dovegreyreader scribbles

How I Came to Know Fish ~ Ota Pavel

So, having been excited at the arrival of the jazzy and very alluring set of Penguin Central European Classics, all I had to do now was start reading them. I'd picked the slightest looking one, How I Came to Know Fish by Ota Pavel (and lest we forget,translated by Jindriska Badal and Robert McDowell,) to ease myself into the reading trail.
At 135 pages it didn't seem too terrifying plus it had 'fish' in the title.
For any newcomers here you may be unaware that, though I can't abide fish on my plate, I reside in an angling household and it's about to start coming in the door by the shoal (perhaps...) and though how I personally came to know fish is of no relevance whatsoever this being me I'll tell you anyway.
Fishing may be one of those subjects I have forgotten more about than most people may glean in three lifetimes because in his spare time Bookhound has been helping Fred Buller, one of the UK's elder statesman of the fishing world and now in his eighties, to research and write what I am told are 'very important ' books on all the largest Atlantic salmon ever caught (The Domesday Book of Giant Salmon) and Volume Two is out later this year.
I know useful things like one of the biggest, the British record for a rod-caught salmon in fact, was landed by a woman called Georgina Ballantyne on 7th October 1922 on the Glendelvine beat of the River Tay and at 64lbs it was a whopper...listen...I know I know, but I've had to listen to all this so you can too...Georgina was on a boat with her father and had attached a dace spinning lure to her rod when...
So anyway I would be fine with a book that mentioned fishing, no question.
Of course How I Came to Know Fish is about far more than that and in fact salmon hardly get a look in, but no worries I know as much about roach, barbel, gudgeon, dace, carp and pike too so I was quite at home.
Born in Prague in 1930, Ota Pavel, the son of an Electrolux salesman, grew up with his brothers in a fishing-mad family in Czechoslovakia forging a successful career as a sport's journalist before dying at the painfully young age of forty three following a heart attack.
Just nine years old when war broke out, many members of his family were arrested and imprisoned,  though young Ota stayed with his mother, who was not Jewish, in the Bohemian town of Bustehrad. Interestingly I discover that the town has very much adopted him as a famous son and a museum now houses some of his personal belongings. For a really informative piece on Pavel's life this article on the Radio Praha website is well worth reading.
It is through fishing that an older Ota reclaims those all-important memories of a childhood blighted by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia as he looks back on the seminal moments in his young life.

'In front of me the river flowed. A man can see they sky. He can stare into the forest, but nobody really sees into a river. Only with a fishing rod can one look there.'

There is a desperate pull and a yearning for home that is woven into the allure and addiction of fishing as he recounts his childhood adventures, because this is the older Ota writing, and during a period of recovery from the acute mental illness that struck with such ferocity as he commentated on the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck in 1964.

'Sometimes, when I sat at the barred window and fished in my memory, the pain was almost unbearable... When I was slowly dying, I remembered most the river I had loved most in my life....'

The true cause of Ota Pavel's breakdown has been the subject of much speculation because it was a sudden and dramatic unraveling, involving a climb into the hills surrounding Innsbruck where he torched farm buildings and was arrested as he then led the animals to safety.

"... the Czech weekly Reflex, writing about Pavel's life, wrote last year the mental collapse may have been triggered by a racist slur. The weekly wrote that a member of the Czech ice hockey team, who felt he was being provoked by the Ota Pavel's claim the team had won bronze, (later confirmed by a change in rules), had snapped at the writer in the locker-room with the words "Jew, go to the gas chambers..." The slur must have been terribly wounding. But, whether it was the single factor that led to the writer's deterioration can probably never be known"

As I read How I Came to Know Fish I was left in little doubt that the beguiling nature of the older Ota's voice as he recalled his younger self and whilst recounting with understatement some of the serious and doubtless terrifying historical events to which he had been witness... occasionally often lightly, almost capriciously captured on the page... may well have concealed much deeper scars.
Fishing gets this family into all sorts of scrapes but brings them inordinate pleasure and laughter too and when the Nazis take over the country it also provides a life-saving source of food. As the years pass there is a heart-rending perspective on the immutability and inevitability of ageing from a child's point of view. Parents who have always been there to look up to and respect as the keepers of the flame, the caretakers and utterers of  wise counsel suddenly start to make seemingly foolish decisions and become unreliable and increasingly dependent.
I wonder if any of you have noticed the beginnings of this odd slippage as we have?
Very gradually, those moments when you find yourself explaining an action to your children and feeling a bit of a numpty... and why do I scurry round tidying when I know they are coming home after a long trip?
Might it be because I don't want them to think the whole show's going to the dogs and we are letting things slide as we get older?
Well it has crossed my mind and I now think it serves me right for trying to keep it so nice all the time they lived here.
For Ota Pavel all this is a comfort and a solace as he reflects on his life through the medium of fishing,

'...so much had disappeared from my life but fish had remained. They were the alternative, the natural world where the jerky streetcar of civilisation did not threaten to jump its tracks.'

and somehow it all gave me an insight into this mad fishing home I live in and as Bookhound prepares for his trips down to the river this season perhaps he too thinks like Ota Pavel,

'Finally I have found the right word: Freedom. Fishing is freedom most of all. To walk on and on after the trout, drinking from natural springs, to be alone, if only for an hour, a few days, weeks, months, to be free of television, newspapers, radio, the community of men and women..'

Am I wrong to simultaneously think...great...I've got the house to myself for a few hours:-)

How I Came to Know Fish an exquisite and very moving book.

Why Translation Matters ~ Edith Grossman

With those European classics in mind, I've been trying to pin down the moment when I made that knowing connection with a translated book, which might seem a bit dense of me but I know I'd taken it for granted until I read The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun.
Admittedly it was all helped along by holding the beautiful little shrink-wrapped US Other Press hardback edition, with its dusky pink cover, in my hand.
Shrink-wrappers on books always make me feel a bit special, as if the publisher has treasured the books enough to want them to reach me in pristine condition. I feel a sort of daft but deep reverence for the contents before I even open it, but at the time I had some reservations about Kathie von Ankum's translation which I've read several times since that first read in March 2005.
It was a single word that just wouldn't sit right... 'gotten'.
A great big Americanism in the midst of a sentence and it stopped me in my tracks.
That 'gotten' has irritated me ever since...would Doris really have said that in 1920s Berlin?
That was until last week when I read what Edith Grossman had to say in her fascinating series of essays Why Translation Matters and I discover that Edith is not one to mince her words so brace yourselves..

'I have discovered to my horror, that far too many British publishers insist on Anglicizing texts that have been translated by those of us who, to their minds, are little more than semi-literate American ex-colonials who flatter ourselves into thinking that the yawp we speak and write is actually English.'

Yes, it made me sit up a bit straight too.
It had never occurred to me that I was making such a value judgement about that single word 'gotten', but on reflection of course I was and embarrassingly I rather prissily said so back in 2005, in those pre-blog days when I wrote a few Amazon reviews...which thankfully I don't now.
It wasn't Queen's English but why on earth should Queen's English be deemed so right and surely I can cope?

'Translation expands our ability to explore through literature the thoughts and feelings of people from another society or another time.'

So my thanks to Edith for sorting out that little dilemma.
Interesting to note that Edith Grossman now has clauses written into any contracts with UK publishers giving her final lexical control over her work, and how essential that now seems. It's a bit like a doctor writing a prescription and the pharmacist being allowed to change it to something different, unthinkable.

New York based Edith Grossman perhaps the foremost translator of Spanish language writers, among them Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlo Fuentes, whilst her translation of Don Quixote is 'widely considered a masterpiece', details quite what life would be like without translation. And whilst bewailing the abysmal record of publishers to embrace and invest in translated works, flags up the frustrations and lack of appreciation for the translators profession (and no I hadn't noticed it either, but the translator's name hardly ever features on the cover of the book) taking reviewers squarely to task for so rarely referencing the translator or the translation.
Well thank heavens I'm not a reviewer, and perhaps Edith doesn't read the blogs, but reflecting back I do know we consistently recognise the endeavours of the translator on here, the Literature in Translation tag when I remember to use it, groups many of those posts together and we've had some interesting discussions about it.
I said as much recently about Adriana Hunter's translation of Beside the Sea by Veronica Olmi. 

"I have to applaud Adriana Hunter's translation of the mother's narrative voice which I feel sure has been captured and preserved in perfect pitch; it's remarkable and I feel sure very close to the original French because it works, maintains the vernacular, nothing incongruous or out of keeping with the characters on the page..."

and how interesting this reading trail might be because those thoughts fly in the face of something I quoted from Susan Sontag back in 2007

"The translator's primary duty is to stay as close as possible to the original text with the understanding that the result will, precisely, read as a translation.To naturalise a foreign book is to lose what is most valuable about it: the spirit of the language, the mental ethos out of which the text emerges."

I shall be reading these texts closely.

Googling Queen's English proved interesting as I roamed this list of traditional Queen's English sayings, which seem to have come some way since the Sovereign had anything to do with it, so I regretfully passed over the canine appendages description for reasons of impropriety and a dread of spam and have settled on spiffing to describe Edith Grossman's very forthright and informative book for which I thank her.

'Imagine how bereft we would be if the only fictional worlds we could explore, the only vicarious literary experiences we could have, were those written in languages we could read easily. The deprivation would be indescribable.'

On Translation...

For reasons best known to himself, Bookhound had been looking to buy an old-fashioned typewriter and preferably for about a fiver.
He found a pristine specimen in a charity shop the other day; immaculate condition, hardly used, lovely keys, ribbon in place and he was just about to buy it when fortunately he put his glasses on for the final close scrutiny and spotted something out of the ordinary.
The keys were Norwegian which probably explains why it was called a Norwegian Blue Imperial, and though he could probably have jumped his way around it and made it type English, that's obviously why it was in a charity shop in Devon.
With sincere apologies to Norwegian visitors I'm afraid there was only one course of action open to us...

...and we proceeded to have one of our ridiculous exchanges wondering if it was dead and pining for the fjords, which will only make sense if you watched Monty Python as religiously as we did, and with further apologies to those who weren't there back in 1969, it won't seem in the least bit amusing.

Clearly we don't get out much and that's apropos of only a very tenuous connection to what now follows.

Among recent book arrivals a plethora of translation (no Norwegian), a set of Central European Classics about to be re-published by Penguin and there I realised was a potential reading trail sitting before me on the kitchen table and a route that I'm not sure I would have known sufficient about to compile for myself.
So whilst I do like to be an independent reading traveller, sometimes I'm quite happy if the navigation is plotted for me and I can always digress if I want to.
I took a more purposeful shine to mittel-European literature when I discovered Joseph Roth a few years ago and I've strolled along the more familiar roads...  Antal Szerb, Sandor Marai, Jaroslav Hasek, but I still feel I know next to nothing of any substance about it, yet I love it for that seemingly lost, other-worldly rather melancholy atmosphere it invokes in me.
It's all a terribly misguided muddle that could do with a bit of organisation and some grounding in reality, especially when through all the mists of that romantic folly you realise that

'These books all come from a culture which has suffered hideously throughout much of the twentieth century - it has been invaded, despoiled and mutilated in a way which is hard for outsiders to appreciate.'

Well, I'm most certainly an outsider who wants to know more and this series promises to take me on

'a political, social and cultural journey from the optimism of pre-1914 Central Europe to the horrors of the Cold War.'

The Penguin collection is one you surely won't miss on the bookshelves in early May with these refreshingly bright and rather eye-catching cover designs.

Mixed-media, part - photo, part - graphics, which thinking back to the recent Margaret Atwood re-issues from Virago seems to be the current trend. There's a quilt in there somewhere, with all those geometrics Kaffe Fasset would have something whipped up in a jiffy that fitted the colour palette perfectly.
A selection of very arresting titles and authors (sorry to make you all twist your necks 90 degrees...be careful) that have certainly made me look twice and investigate, and perhaps from a range of lesser know literary countries for me, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Hungary, Transylvania before it became part of Romania.

I've dug deep and think I've at least heard of Karel Capek and Czeslaw Milosz but I'm going to plead terrible ignorance on the rest and so all information and suggestions about which to read soonest would be very welcome, along with any ideas for background reading for someone whose history of that invasion, despoilation and mutilation is intermittent, verging on non-existent.
The books will need to be available and accessible, nothing to dry and dusty. I somehow want this to come to life because I'd like to discover more by and about these writers along the way too.
I shall be wading in slowly with How I Came to Know Fish by Czech writer Ota Pavel, because I'm a bit nervous and it's the skinniest one, and, with quite a few other reading commitments to fulfill, slender suits my reading mood right now; but it's also a childhood memoir and that suits my current remit too.
Moreover I really like the sound of it.

'Fishing with his father and his Uncle Prosek - the two finest fishermen in the world - he takes a peaceful pleasure from the rivers and ponds of his country.'

Well by osmosis I've forgotten more than most people might ever want to know about fishing in the first place, so I'm interested, but more so for this...

' When the Nazis invade, Pavel must steal their confiscated fish back from under the noses of the SS to feed his family. With tales of his father's battles to provide for his family both in freedom and in persecution, this is one boy's passionate and affecting tale of life, love and fishing.'

From the book I know this.
Oto Pavel was born in Prague in 1930, the son of a Jewish travelling salesman, much of his family was arrested and imprisoned during the war. He became a sport's journalist and was a great enthusiast of ice hockey and fishing, though whilst covering the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck in 1964 he became severely ill and spent much of the rest of his life in various mental hospitals. During that time he wrote this book which was finally published in 1990.

I'm now incredibly intrigued by this journey, but, ever the hasty reading traveller once I've been inspired, I decided to take some time to read Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman before I hit the road and what a good thing I did, more soon.

Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi

You have to admire the bravery of anyone setting out as an independent publisher these days, or so we are told from within. The book zeitgeist is supposedly not sparkling, more awash with doom and gloom, so I was delighted to be contacted by Meike Ziervogel recently.
Now I think I actually know how to pronounce Meike because I once visited a new mum called Meike and she told me it rhymed with forMICA as in kitchen worktops, so I hope that's right and I'm not having an Imogen moment, sadly pronounced Emogun by me for years after reading What Katy Did when I was about seven.
Meike's very cheery email was full of optimism with news that she was at the helm of a newish little publishing house intent on publishing contemporary fiction in translation and asking whether I would be interested in reading the first title from Peirene Press.
Peirene a Greek nymph who turned into a water spring providing a source of liquid and poetic inspiration to the poets of Corinth. Meike suggests that metamorphosis likewise represents the art of translation, and its efforts to turn a foreign book into an enjoyable read. Translation a skill, as we have oft appreciated here, involving that careful attention to detail and necessitating, as Meike elaborates in her publicity material, an understanding of the voice and the rhythm of the original.
I'm always up for more literature in translation and having now read  the first title from Peirene Press I'm very pleased I said yes.
It's a funny thing, don't you think that 30 mile literary gap across the Channel might as well be the Grand Canyon.?
Do contemporary French best-sellers travel well?
I'm not sure, perhaps it puts me under too much pressure to be told that the entire French nation have loved a book.

Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi was first published in France in 2001 and translated into all the major European languages ...and the entire French nation loved it and I thought 'oh dear'.
This is Bord de Mer's first foray into English and firstly I do have to issue a health warning.

Journal du Dimanche said

'This story tears your heart apart'

and they are not far wrong.
A single mother has left home in a hurry with her two young sons, Stan and Kevin, on a trip to the seaside. It's quite clear from the off that her thought processes are jumbled and confused and I was immediately reminded  of two books,  When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale for its portrayal of children in the care of a mother with mental illness and Prince Rupert's Teardrop by Lisa Glass. This latter for its unusual and discomfiting portrayal of mental illness. If you found anything in either of those that impressed you, then you might find more here.
Narrated by the unnamed mother, Beside the Sea becomes a strange mix of unreliable narrative and veiled hints at what may have gone before, and which I won't reveal because they are subtle and were interesting to pick up on as I read. The book is riven with acute physical discomfort, it's cold, it rains, it's muddy, everyone gets drenched, the hotel is dreadful and all this 'wrongness' somehow compounds and distills the impression of the mental anguish, as does the whole notion of the children tagging along, clearly mindful of their mother's problems. 
The sun has no plans to shine on this beleaguered little family so start bracing yourself.
With their mother misreading the signs around her and misinterpreting the gestures, the children's confusion is not hard to imagine. Watching Stan and Kevin through this fractured lens and the bizarrely refracted light of the mother's tangled thought processes and I could only begin to imagine what they were thinking and feeling
At just over a hundred pages Beside the Sea is perfect for one long sitting but be prepared for one of the saddest endings to a book you might read this year or even this lifetime.
I'm not sure I've ever read anything quite like it and as I turned the final page I was possibly a bit pale around the gills and dumbstruck at the place where Veronique Olmi had taken me and left me...it's one of those last sentence books... but I was also suffused by that warm glow of entente cordiale vive la France oneness because I think I got a sense of why this book has been so popular.
I have to applaud Adriana Hunter's translation of the mother's narrative voice which I feel sure has been captured and preserved in perfect pitch; it's remarkable and I feel sure very close to the original French because it works, maintains the vernacular, nothing incongruous or out of keeping with the characters on the page. I'd love to know your thoughts on this if you decide to read it and I see Adriana Hunter also responsible for another book I have sitting here, Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie, author of the wonderful Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

Peirene Press have more books planned for later in the year, they have a lovely website and a very self-effacing and funny blog about giving birth to this, their first book, plus news of the literary salons they run, and I'm saying all this as if Meike were my best friend when in fact we wouldn't know it if we trod on each other. However I just think Peirene Press have been very honest, seem to have gone into this with no illusions or delusions and have held fast to the most important point, publish a good book.
I really wish them much success because they couldn't have tried any harder to shine a glimmer of light into this dismal world that we are told is publishing a la 2010.
I have an early proof copy of a forthcoming title, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius of whom I know nothing, but the synopsis has me intrigued as does the format.

'Rome one January afternoon in 1943. A young German woman is on her way to listen to a Bach concert at the Lutheran church. Innocent and naive, the war is for her little more than a daydream, until she realizes that her husband might never return...a mesmerizing psychological portrait of the human need to safeguard innocence and integrity at any cost - even at the risk of excluding reality.'

That format, 'a single 105-page long sentence with a beautifully clear rhythm.'
Zut alors, je suis tres excited except this one's translated from the German but anyway, scroll down for gifts.

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

'In early June I spotted Stefan Zweig's latest book Spinoza, in the window of a bookshop on avenue Kleber. Today I hurry over there to buy a copy. The book is no longer in the window, and the bookseller informs me that she is not allowed to sell it anymore. I refuse to give up, and in the end she reveals that the Zweig books are packed up in the room behind the shop; after swearing me to secrecy, she eventually agrees to let me have a copy. It appears that the list of banned books has already been drawn up, and that they will be destroyed. So we no longer have the right to read or say what we want in the privacy of our own homes.'

This was the redoubtable Agnes Humbert in Paris on 7th August 1940 and an episode recounted in her book Resistance - Memoirs of Occupied France. and I had cause to recall it because I'm deeply embedded in the life of Stefan Zweig right now. I hope I'm not over-egging my love and respect for the man, his life and his writing in recent weeks, but his autobiography The World of Yesterday will certainly be in amongst my best reads of the year if and when I try to pin them down to a list.
Stefan Zweig confirms what I sensed I knew about him from his fiction, a modest and self-effacing man nursing a profound sensitivity and an astute line in judgment all of which he utilises to full effect here.
I've been reading this one at snail's pace over the last month or more and have just made the 200-page halfway point,

'Then on June 29, 1914, in Sarajevo, the shot was fired which in a single second shattered the world of security and creative reason in which we had been educated, grown up and been at home - shattered it like a hollow vessel of clay.'

Europe is a rumbling volcano, the stack is about to blow and as he reflects on the world rushing headlong towards that war, Stefan Zweig has offered me some new perspectives.
Firstly, whilst admitting what we all now know,

'Calmly reflecting on the past, if one asks why Europe went to war in 1914, neither reasonable ground nor even provocation can be found..'

he then goes on to elaborate,

'Every state had the feeling of being strong and forgot that every other State had the same feeling, each wanted more and wanted something from the other. And the worst was that just the sentiment which we most highly valued - our common optimism - betrayed us. For each one thought that in the last moment the other would draw back affrightedly; and so the diplomats began their game of bluff.'

It's a  chunk of world history I have never really explored in any depth and as Stefan Zweig recounts the 'slight discomfort whenever a rattle of shots came from the Balkans' and proceeds to offer some personal observations about the people and daily life that worried him, I began to build up the picture for myself and the route to conflagration became increasingly clear.
Stefan Zweig writes with a piercing and self-effacing honesty that cuts to the quick,

'Never, and I say this without pride, but rather with shame - has any generation experienced such a moral retrogression from such a spiritual height as our generation has.'

There is so much in this eminently readable book to savour as Stefan Zweig allows himself to step back, positions himself firmly in that crow's nest vantage point overlooking a history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, and becomes a primary source and witness to the rise of anti-semitism and fascism.
The book is a fine social history too; pre- and post- fin de siecle Vienna had bred several generations who knew nothing of conflict and applauded the rise of the Jewish bourgeoisie as a positive force for good in the cultural life of the Austrian capital,

'nine-tenths of what the world celebrated as Viennese culture in the nineteenth century was promoted, nourished or even created by Viennese Jewry.'

Stefan Zweig met and knew many of the prophets, names to conjure with, Sigmund Freud, Rudolf Steiner, Rilke and Rodin and was a part of this milieu, leaving him perfectly placed to reflect on the rise of many of the luminaries of the day.
Mahler and Schonberg, Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, Sonnenthal and Reinhardt burnishing the city's universal reputation for music, literature and the theatre respectively. Meanwhile Freud was busy doing what Freud did best and his influence on Stefan Zwieg's thinking is nowhere more evident than in the chapter Eros Matutinus. Stefan Zweig reflects on a puberty and adolescence blighted by reserve, secrecy and misinformation for a generation who were preparing for something very different

'...we grew up in this sticky, perfumed, sultry unhealthy atmosphere. This dishonest and unpsychological morality of secrecy and hiding hung over us like a nightmare.'

Zweig's dissections of the conceits and the buttoned-up world of repression in which he and his friends were raised, the disparity and inequalities between men and women in dress, behaviour and social expectations to all of which they were expected to conform, highlights just how ready this generation was to rebel and break free of the world their parents and grandparents had known.
The Cassandras were there alright.
The unknown to me Berta von Suttner, the woman who took it upon herself to hinder any progress towards war in any way she could, the woman who persuaded Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, to atone for that discovery with the endowment of the Nobel Prize for Peace and International Understanding.
I've just been turning page after page thinking how amazing that one book can offer me so much inspiration, more to explore, other writers to seek out and I still have the second half to go,

'The summer of 1914 would have been even more memorable for us even without the doom which it spread over the European earth. I had rarely experienced one more luxuriant, more beautiful and. I am tempted to say more summery...the heavens were a silly blue, the air soft yet not sultry, the meadows fragrant and warm..,'

Gangway...gangway, let me at the rest of this book right now.

Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

I guess it's going to happen soon.
My supply of available novels in translation by Stefan Zweig will dry up and I'll be bereft and just have to read those I have over again. I've already read several twice but my ongoing read of Stefan Zweig's autobiography is just making me hungry or as A.S.Byatt says, greedy for more.
Burning Secret published originally in 1913 as Brennendes Geheimnis but more recently in an English translation by Anthea Bell by Pushkin Press and in one of those delicious 'little' editions they have made their own and with some contemporaneous artwork on the cover.
This a 1911 painting by Kadinsky.
Three main players, twelve year old Edgar and his mother have left his father behind and are holidaying alone at the Austrian resort of Semmering up in the mountains when their close-knit bond is interrupted by the arrival of the gregarious pleasure-seeking Baron,

'He knew that if he was to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.'

The huntsman with a strategy best defines the lady-killer Baron and in his sights, Edgar's mother. Befriended by the Baron, it is some time before the naive Edgar realises the true motives behind the Baron's effusive interest. Once the truth starts to dawn Edgar is invaded by new and previously unknown emotions, new behaviours,

'Once he might perhaps have been naughty in order to annoy her, but you learn a lot when you hate and you learn it fast.'

For a brilliant delineation of the mind of a child on the brink of adulthood, look no further. Edgar does not yet possess the guile of an adult, he is readily duped and when the Baron's duplicity becomes apparent his reactions hover in that no-man's land between childhood and adolescence. Acting on impulse and with no thought for the consequences, Edgar's impetuousness will lead to him learning the first of many lessons in that heady land of adulthood,

'Dimly he felt that the secret was the bolt on the door of childhood, and once he had shot back the bolt and conquered the secret it would mean he was a grown up, a man at long last.'

Stefan Zweig has that happy knack of choosing his locations carefully, here the rarified mountain atmosphere where the air is that little bit thinner, everything is defined more sharply and with crystal clarity. Then he proceeds to examine every nuance with that microscopic lens of his, the glance, the blush , the discomfort, nothing is too minor to be missed, those unspoken moments leading to assumptions, the 'cause' which allows the reader to add the 'effect.'
Why was Edgar's mother so angry to find that, sent to his room from the dinner table they were sharing with the Baron, Edgar has sat and waited for her in her room?
Edgar is completely perplexed at her rage, yet we are not...well I wasn't.
Stefan Zweig doesn't need to say it but I did... what if she had returned to her room 'with company'.
Edgar's mother has lessons to learn too as she approaches that time in a child's life when as a mother you have to stage something of an emotional retreat and let them sort it all out for themselves, let them rewrite that treasured childhood relationship you've had with them, as they become distant and grunt instead of talking. Thankfully the plan is that they return as well-balanced young adults who pat you on the head and willingly come and carry the shopping in from the car or lend you a tenner, but be prepared to be told a few home truths along the way perhaps....you won't wear those Ugg boots outside the house will you and definitely not with a short skirt...but they keep my feet lovely and warm.
I gave them to Offspringette in the end.
Edgar, spotting his mother's weakness for the Baron's advances and sensing a disloyalty to his father, wastes no time in honing his fledgling adolescent emotional skills on her as he advises 'you ought to beware of him',

'It was terrible to her to find an inner voice of her own conscience, separated from herself and disguised as a child, going around masquerading as her own child, warning and deriding her.'

So more wonderful Stefan Zweig.
Every book I read of his touches something special, makes me think and see anew and the very good news is that this November Pushkin Press will be releasing a new edition of the fantastic autobiography The World of Yesterday that I'm slow-reading in the old University of Nebraska edition at the moment.  I'll have to do a halfway post soon because there is so much to say about Stefan Zweig's incredible outlook on his life as it builds slowly and inexorably towards the rise of Hitler and as my November Remembrance Reading is going to be World War II this year it couldn't be more apposite.
Mention and plaudits too for the translation of Burning Secrets by Anthea Bell and eternal gratitude for that intervention and careful mediation that allows me to read and appreciate yet again this amazing writer.

The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna

Commenting on the contentious subject of negative book reviews on blogs elsewhere this week, someone remarked that if I put up a negative post about a book (I had clarified that I don't presume to do reviews, far too subjective and emotional here for that and you all know my position ad nauseum on being the wrong reader for a book ) it would probably send them rushing off to buy it because they'd be bound to love it. From that I could only draw the inference that they assume we share wildly differing reading tastes, which is fine, but who can know what my reading tastes are because I'm not even sure I know that myself now.
How can you pin it down in that way because over the last three plus years, and over 500 books scribbled about later, I think I've forgotten where my comfort zone was and writing the scribbles makes me range far and wide in an attempt to close no doors, so sometimes a really unusual book finds its way onto my reading pile.
In fact can you believe it, I actually put them there myself because I’m always grateful for that deviation from the path of true comprehension. There is something quite unfettered and refreshing about reading something I don’t quite grasp immediately if I feel brave enough to persevere.
To be beguiled and slightly mystified by a book's purpose, to turn the final page and start thinking ‘what on earth was that about’ all feels good for the vitality of a reading life like mine, keeps it sparky, edgy, unsettled and on its toes.
So I was up for The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna and published by Peter Owen.
I'll admit I was sold on the cover for a start because I do like hares.
Who can resist that dear little hare peeking its head snugly out of a man’s jacket as if it belonged there and by page ten it does belong there and you don’t want it anywhere else, certainly not leaping through a field or anything.
Discovering that the author Arto Passilinna has been ‘amusing Finns for thirty years and readers in twenty-five languages...’

Writing ‘comedy highlighted with deadpan...’

And that the French have made this book into a cult all added to the mystique and then you wonder what sort of a sense of humour you’re likely to possess when you live ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle, surely you must have something special to share?
Here beginneth bizarre but if can enter into the spirit of the thing it might help.
Jaded journalist Vatanen, wearying of city life hits a hare whilst driving out on a country road. Leaving his car ticking over and a colleague sitting within, Vatanen hot foots into the forest after the injured hare and in a fit of guilt and wild abandon decides to throw in the towel on his life to date, job, marriage the lot and take to the wilds of Finland with the hare for company.
There follows a series of unlikely adventures and disasters including being arrested for being in possession of a hare, a forest fire, a lot of alcohol and a very Mary Shelley-like final bear hunt that reminded me of a latter-day chase across the ice after Viktor's Frankensteinian monster.
Whether it's the luck of the hare, or is it Vatanen's, but neither seem to be the harbingers of good fortune. As Vatanen discovers, ‘loving animals can be a heavy load’ and one of frequent and hilarious moments when the inevitable hare droppings cause much human mayhem as they end up variously in a pocket, a pulpit and a bowl of soup.
Fable or fairy tale I’m sure The Year of the Hare must be an allegory for something, if only ways to box and cox with the ordinariness of everyday life, and could readily be invested with acres of diffuse and meaningful interpretations.
I did get as far as checking out the symbolism of the hare in my trusty dictionary and discovered the usual things about moon deity, fertility, rebirth, rejuvenation, resurrection, intuition, light in darkness and much about trickster tendencies.
The trickster reference rang a bell that had already chimed, because I had followed that line of enquiry when I came across Vatanen and the hare’s encounter with a raven, all reminiscent of my recent Ted Hughes - Baskin foray.
Then I stumbled across the Chinese zodiac and the Year of the Hare's significance,

'Persons born in the Year of the Hare are talented and ambitious. They are popular with anybody and good entertainers which often makes them the centre of attention. Even though they are liked they are rather pessimistic, insecure and are afraid of changes. They almost never lose their temper and are very good-natured.

Somehow that made more sense than anything in relation to this amazing little book, this hare most certainly takes centre stage and Vatanen is nothing if not insecure.
Finally I said whoaaa and stopped myself, because this felt like a book I didn’t actually want to be too clever about understanding.
It’s just a fabulously weird, whacky and original read not least because by page twenty there really seems nothing unusual about a man loping around a forest with a hare tucked in his jacket and if I saw such a thing tomorrow in the village I wouldn’t be in the least bit perturbed.
In fact, this is Devon and saying that reminds of children walking in the door from school with baby rabbits they'd found in the lane and tucked inside their blazers and me screeching,

'Take them back, they're full of fleas..and then wash your hands...and put your blazer on a hot wash...with biological soap powder...and empty the pockets first...'

Kill-joy mother that I was.
Long may books like this leap onto my reading stack. and sit there waiting patiently for that bizarre reading moment to come along because it always will and it never fails.

Child of All Nations by Irmgard Keun

My love for the writing of Irmgard Keum remains undiminished even if the books are devilishly difficult to get hold of in translation. First discovered thanks to a friend's recommend of The Artificial Silk Girl, then I found a copy of After Midnight and now Child of All Nations, first published in German in 1938, subsequently banned by the Nazi regime and now republished by Penguin. and that the sum total of my Irmgard Keun shelf.
Translations by Michael Hofmann never disappoint. He is amongst others responsible for my undying love for the writing of Joseph Roth after all and Child of All Nations must have been uber-challenging  because there is the challenge of eight year-old Kully's first person narrative voice to pin down onto the page.
Kully, the bright sparky child of wandering emigré parents; a child whose education has been in the School of Life rather than the classroom through the early 1930s.
The emotionally needy gambling, alcoholic writer father who harbours deep within a soft, kindish heart. A man who will live by the word of a lie yet can't stop himself giving away the family's last groat to someone whose need appears even greater  than his own.
The ditzy, confused equally needy mother living on her nerves, moved from hotel to hotel and left in hock with Kully as human pawn whilst her husband criss-crosses Europe ostensibly in search of a publisher and funds but also women.
And then Kully with her multi-lingual ease of learning and childlike assessment of a situation, yet with an understanding and experience way beyond her years and who cares desperately for them both.
As a fictional account of an emigre childhood this could not be bettered as Irmgard Keun, through Kully's voice, traces the anxieties and by inference leaving the reader to add in the true analysis of the family's plight as they wander around a Europe on the brink of a catastrophic war.
There are many wonderful moments of humour as this serious world is viewed through the eyes of a child,

'In Bordighera we went first to the station, but my grandmother wasn't there. We needed to find her, because we didn't have any money except for the Bottom Dollar. The Bottom Dollar was a ten-dollar note, which my mother kept in her knickers for emergencies and must never be spent.'

Turning the final page not quite the bereft disappointment I usually feel for a writer who I know I'd love to read more of if I could only find the books in English, because there beckons the most insightful afterword from Michael Hofmann.
Plenty of background information and the observation that, having spent several years travelling around Europe in the company of Joseph Roth there is strong supposition that Irmgard Keun may well have based the character of Kullys' father on Roth. All strongly denied by Keun in her lifetime but as Michael Hofmann points out she, like Roth, was an accomplished liar so we can but suppose and enjoy.
Irmgard Keun's own account of Joseph Roth during those years of exile,

'I felt here was someone who was simply about to die of sadness. His round blue eyes were almost blind with despair and his voice sounded as though buried under tons of grief. Later on, that impression blurred a little, because at that time, Roth wasn't just sad, he was also the greatest and most impassioned of haters...'

Fascinating lives and how good it would to be able to read biographies of both in English translation at affordable prices.
Irmgard Keun's exile in 1936 from Nazi repression and subsequent return to Germany in 1940 under an assumed name all suggests a life about which I'd love to know more,

'There was something about her honesty, her spark, her refusal of indoctrination, her subversiveness that riled them.'

My vintage and antiquated drawer of paper files also yields an Irmgard Keun folder containing more.
According to Michael Hofmann in a Guardian article of a year ago, Keun linked favourably with that cohort of writers from the 1920s and 30s, Jean Rhys, Anita Loos, Rosamund Lehmann, Vicki Baum and later Sybille Bedford,

'clever, fast-moving, important and unburdened with the turgid intellectual purpose of so many men's books of the time...a chronicler of the atmosphere of Nazism's rise..'

I'm in danger of repeating myself I know and I'm beyond thankful for Child of All Nations, but we still need much more Irmgard Keun.

Esther's Inheritance by Sándor Márai (and prize draw copies)

'Doomed love cannot die.'

I certainly caught the Sándor-Máraitis (and if you knew how long it took me to get those fiddly diddly things over the 'a' you'd be worried for me) that was doing the rounds when Embers first hit the shelves, and now I see that was all of five years ago, seems like yesterday, but this was when literature in translation was starting to appeal to me. Sándor Márai one of Hungary's leading literary novelists of the 1930s, survived the war but communist persecution forced him into exile, first in Italy and then the United States where he eventually committed suicide in 1989.
Somehow post-Embers I'd then missed anything else by Sándor Márai until the arrival of Esther's Inheritance published by Picador.
If I were to try and compare the two, which is dodgy after a five year gap, I'd wonder whether Esther's Inheritance might be a subtle re-working of the themes in Embers. The meeting of old adversaries after many years, shattered lives, betrayals, old passions and for sure they are all there, but this time from the point of view of a female narrator.
Esther lives with old and loyal family friend Nunu on the brink of hardship and nursing a loss that has its origins some twenty years before, when the love of her life Lajos quite suddenly and inexplicably seemed to transfer his affections and married her sister Vilma.
Lajos a man who lacks a moral compass, a con man whose power resides in his complete lack of conscience and seeming detachment from his own emotions, and one who has subsequently stripped the family of their assets. I think we might even cast him as a sociopath these days,

'His charm acted on us like a cheap, wicked spell...my experience of Lajos is that he is the kind of man who begins with lies but then in the middle of his lying grows passionate and weeps, going on to lie more, this time with tears in his eyes...'

Vilma's death occasions an unexpected request to visit the family home from Lajos and everyone gathers and prepares for the event. They have no illusions about him and Esther prepares her emotional defences to repel whatever demands Lajos might make. No one thinks for one minute that this fly-by-night has any other motive but money.
What follows is one of those reads that had me initially whispering at the page and eventually shouting DON'T SIGN IT... as Lajos, with all the guile of  the con man that he is, makes his demands. Esther's final decision pitted against what this reader wanted to happen, and it all became a bit of a battle royal as I turned the pages. In fact it all left me quite shattered as even I, albeit unwillingly, slowly started to understand Sándor Márai's 'moral cripple',

'To be properly creative one needs something else...some special strength or discipline or a mixture of the two; the stuff, I think, they call character...And that quality, that talent, is something that is missing in me. It's like a strange deafness. It is as if I knew the music, the tune being played, precisely, but could not hear the notes.'

It's all mighty quietly powerful stuff and as I emerged licking my wounds I had good cause to reflect on the subtle cleverness of a book that teaches you one of life's useful lessons.
How easy it is to judge a situation from a single perspective, from one side of a story, perhaps decide how someone should sort out a problem (kick him where it hurts Esther) and say so, but walk a mile in their shoes first (doomed love can never die) and then try and say it, and somehow it's not quite so easy.
Sándor Márai gives Esther a voice with which to make her own decisions and then to explain them on her own terms, transforming this from a book that could have been about bitter revenge and retribution into one about the power of thwarted love and an achingly resigned forgiveness, tinged with regrets.
Humiliation it seems can go either way and books like this could probably stop wars.
I was a wrung out dishcloth by the end and you too can be likewise, three prize draw copies of Esther's Inheritance by Sándor Márai and a great read for the lucky winners, names in comments and Rocky will stir his paws and choose.

The Blue Fox - Sjon

So it was a dog last week, this week it's a fox, a blue one, and I'm just wondering what it might be next week (suggestions?)
But firstly I'm also wondering how a publisher like Telegram Books has passed unnoticed in my reading life to date?
Why hadn't I heard of them?
Should I get out more?
Do the reps get this far because surely I'd notice books like these on the shelves?
The Telegram list is that perfect blend of old and new with plenty of fiction in translation which I always love, writers from Turkey, the Faroe Islands, Lebanon, China and my first Telegram read Iceland.
What with being a snow expert now, Iceland seemed an appropriate place to read after my Alafoss Lopi moment but I have also read a few other Icelandic authors and enjoyed them, though I'll admit I'm building slowly to tackling Halldor Laxness (fortify me someone, tell me I'll be alright)
However to The Blue Fox by Sjón.
That queen of Iceland Bjork thinks this is a 'magical novel' whilst A.S.Byatt finds it 'comic and lyrical' so I must see what it is all about.
The author I discover is actually a poet, lyricist and song writer too, Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson and the pen name Sjón means 'sight'.
This all bodes well if he can pull it off.
Well I have to agree The Blue Fox is magical, as events during a week in January 1883 unfold and the Reverend Baldur Skuggason sets off on an ill-fated hunting expedition in the teeth of a howling blizzard. Meanwhile his neighbour Fridrik Fridjonsson is dealing with something else entirely.
Having returned to settle his parents' affairs in the neighbourhood fifteen years earlier and intending just a brief sojourn, Fridrik found himself tied to his home again by an act of kindness with the discovery of Hafdis Jonsdottir. Calling herself  Abba, Fridrik finds the young girl with Down's Syndrome manacled and ill-treated in a ship which had run aground. 
His life with Abba since has been one of pure revelation and when events with Abba weave inextricably with those surrounding the blue fox and Rev. Skuggason, I realised that I was reading one of those deceptively simple but deeply meaningful fables with a hint of fairy tale and perfect elements of myth and mysticism.
Poets, if they can successfully make the transition to fiction, do it with that special word-gift. That minimalist approach, a paring down to the very essentials and you know every single word holds power and meaning. In The Blue Fox, a single sentence on a page requires careful thought, not a quick flick onto the next page and I was frequently stopping to consider

' The sun warms the white man's body, and the snow melting with a diffident creaking, passes for birdsong.'

Or this beautiful description of the Northern Lights and my apologies, I can't credit this photo, it arrived in one of those e mails that do the rounds but I had to use it, it fits Sjon's words perfectly.

'The rim of daylight was fading.
     In the halls of heaven it was now dark enough for the Aurora Borealis sisters to begin their lively dance of the veils. With an enchanted play of colours they flitted light and quick about the great stage of the heavens, in fluttering gold dresses, their tumbling pearl necklaces scattering here and there in their wild caperings.'

The book has its amusing moments too.
Man stalks fox who lures man on deeper and deeper into unknown territory, fortunately man has packed lunch with him,

'Hand thick slabs of lamb, rye cakes with sheep's butter, sour as gall, topped with mutton sausage, a dried cod's head, pickled blood pudding, dried fish, curd porridge and a lump of brown sugar.'

Good, sounds worse than...than...yes, bubble and squeak or heaven forfend...um...tripe and jellied eels (I'll bet someone out there loves tripe as much as all the b&s fans) because even this early on in the book I'm beginning to think this may be just what Reverend Skuggason deserves.
As always hats off to the translator Victoria Cribb. I have always understood that Icelandic is a fiendishly difficult language to grasp, making that capture of the essence of a book like this all the more impressive.
This one would make a splendid book group read because even as I have written this new revelations have come to mind, that fox is still beckoning and I know there is plenty that I have missed in my first reading. All adding to the value of a book like The Blue Fox, it will hold up to many visits and countless interpretations and actually I can't wait to read it again.

The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

The arrival of a book by Stefan Zweig is always a time for celebration chez dovegrey ever since I first discovered his writing the day I decided to explore some of the authors whose books had been banned in Nazi Germany. I think this in turn was a trail that had opened up after I had read Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi. It sounds like an odd reading trail to follow but I was intrigued, what had been so controversial about these books and their authors, I wanted to know.
I had unwittingly already read books by a few but I had never heard of Stefan Zweig and so began that little addiction and Pushkin Press to the rescue with The Royal Game, Twilight, Moonbeam Alley and Fantastic Night & other stories read in quick succession.
The Post Office Girl, translated by Joel Rotenberg, arrived from Sort Of Books, one chapter and I was instantly in it for the home run. The setting is perhaps classic Stefan Zweig, mittel Europe between the wars and Christina the Post Office girl of the title living a dull, miserable existence in rural Austria. Working in the Post Office by day and caring for her invalid mother the rest of the time Christina Hoflehner's life is a grey and joyless relentless grind until a letter from her mother's sister, who has fared altogether better in the marriage and wealth stakes, invites Christina to share a fortnight's holiday with them. Klara has suffered sudden onset pangs of guilt at her serial neglect of her sister over the years and this gesture towards her neice will surely make amends as she and gruff husband Anthony van Boolen travel from the US for a relaxing high society sojourn at a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps.
Christina's is the generation in Europe that stood to lose the most from the Great War and the sense of resentment and dissatisfaction is profound in this book,

'Surrounded by this coarse and lustful postwar generation she feels ancient, tired, useless, and overwhelmed, unwilling and unable to compete...the war stole her decade of youth. She has no courage, no strength left even for happiness.'

By the age of twenty-six Christina has already prepared to hunker down and accept her lot, until of course she samples life at the glittering Palace Hotel. Exposed to the silken smooth world of money and luxury, where the furniture gleams and the carpet suspires Christina steps in to sample a way of life that she eventually realises will change her forever.
It was always going to be a moment of extreme cruelty when the clock struck midnight and this Cinderella is catapulted back into the harsh reality of life at home, the cramped, musty little box-like garret flat smelling of vinegar and a lifetime of the dull day job and caring for her dropsical mother with the bloated feet.
The happily ever after bit will surely rely on the entrance of a cheekily handsome prince on a white charger galloping in stage left, so when the only man on the horizon is Ferdinand, a thin, bitter and angry down-at-heel survivor of the Russian front, wearing not a gold encrusted doublet and a pair of natty hose but a worn-out inverness coat, you start to worry for poor Christina and wonder quite what the rescue plan might be.
Right that's it, no more plot, enough is plenty, not a word more.
Stefan Zweig was a great friend of Freud so expect plenty of 'who am I really' deliberations and some wonderful character development in Christina but I also came away with a very clear idea of the despair, blame, anger and hatred that fuelled and propelled a generation towards another war. The portents couldn't be outlined with more precision as Stefan Zweig focuses on the inequalities and injustices that pervaded people's lives. If you know anything about Stefan Zweig's personal life also be prepared to identify other more sinister portents about which I will say no more either.
This was the archetypal page-turner of a book, the best I have read by Stefan Zweig to date even, people I cared about and just had to know how they fared, which leads me onto my only single solitary disappointment which I will share.
Despite high quality production values, a perfectly judged cover and good weight paper,  I'm wondering whether I had a rogue copy, did mine just miss the glue machine?
I'm reasonably gentle with books as I read them but I do always crack spines and this is the first book to do this in a long time. It started to fall apart in my hands halfway through and thereafter I was done for, just about every page fell out as I turned.
The publishers will hate me for this and booksellers will definitely want to shoot me on sight, but if you plan to buy this edition I'd give that spine a little workout before you do.

Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac

George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte found Balzac's books distasteful but after my first one I'm impressed, and there's no quick way to impart all this, so if you have the time, be my guest, get the coffee on and settle down for dovegreyreader Bigs Up Balzac.
In fact I have given myself quite an extraordinary surprise by reading  Eugenie Grandet, because it was excellent, start to finish. I was expecting a bit of a plod because I had quite thought of Balzac as probably impenetrable and dense because everyone always speaks of him in hushed, reverential tones which have always implied an insurmountable degree of difficulty to me.
Pshaw or words to that effect.
I suspect Eugenie Grandet was a good launching point into Balzac. Just under 200 pages and I was quickly drawn into the realist writing and Family Grandet of Saumur, as mother and daughter Eugenie cope with the tyrannic cruelty of a miserly husband and father who, despite having the wealth of Croesus stashed in his room, purports to have not two sous to rub together,

'Financially speaking, Monsieur Grandet had the qualities of both a tiger and a boa-constrictor. He had the art of lying in wait, hidden, studying his prey for a long time, and finally jumping on it; then he would open his purse, gulp down a load of coins, and lie down again quietly to digest, like a serpent, impassive, cold, and methodical.'

Allegations abound of Balzac's insufferable and garrulous attention to detail, all likely to leave a reader feeling on the brink of asphyxiation and rising claustrophobia with no gaps and silences, nothing left to the imagination; well none of it held any quarter here because I just wallowed in this tale of life in rural France. Admittedly I felt a good deal of ambivalence towards the characters, little seemed destined to arouse my sympathies so perhaps I hadn't been encouraged to imagine much in those lives beyond the page as I drank in all the extraneous detail, but I suspect a second read would deal with that.
Kicking off my need-to-know-much-more about Honore de Balzac with the little Hesperus Brief Lives biography by David Carter was probably a good move. Bite-sized digestible chunks of Balzac's life plus handy little snippets such as the anecdote about the women scrabbling on the floor for locks of his hair when he had it cut.
With my interest now waxing obsessive I delved further and spent good money (£3) at Book Barn on an old  copy of Balzac by the superlative Stefan Zweig, whilst leaving behind a shelf full of well-thumbed and beautifully pencil-annotated Complete Works.
Let's not run before we can walk etc
Thanks to Stefan I discovered that it was all down to Balzac's attention to women in his writing that gained him such a loyal following,

'Women always have a preference for a writer who is concerned with their problems, and Balzac's predilection for his women characters whom he depicted as the unhappy, misunderstood victims of man, the allowances he made for their failings, his sympathy with abandoned, outcast or ageing females...'

Plenty of detail from Stefan Zweig about Balzac's legendary writing routine too, the white robe, the stack of special paper with a blue-ish tinge to prevent eye strain, only raven's feather quill pens would do, and the coffee, a special three-bean brew (Bourbon, Martinique and Mocha and why aren't Costa serving up a Balzac Latte?) mixed only by the man himself and an estimated 50,000 cups downed in his lifetime.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm also thinking Balzac may have invented the fashion for the obligatory long drawn-out Parisian literary death.
A jolly good Parisian death seems to outdo any other death anywhere ten times over, and Balzac notched up a fine selection of gruesome and messy ailments ,dropsy, peritonitis, blisters and gangrene for which the treatment of choice in 1850 included a hundred leeches on his stomach.
Stefan Zweig gives an incredibly moving account of Balzac's demise following his carefully stage-managed arrival for the first time at his recently completed Parisian dream home, Pavillon Beaujon. The house would be glowing with light and bursting with fresh flowers to impress the mistress who had finally become his wife (perhaps suspecting this wouldn't take long) only to be rapidly faced with a fulminating bout of death from all his complaints combined,

'Balzac died at half-past ten on the evening of August the 17th, 1850. His mother was the only person present, his wife having long since retired. His end was terribly lonely.'

David and Stefan between them certainly equipped me to face the demons and my first foray into the world of Balzac.
As always there is an informative introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition, in this case written by Christopher Prendergast and in which he offers an interesting take on the definition of a classic and the value of multiple readings,

' A better way of construing the 'identity' of  the classic would be to see it as that which is porous to multiple reading, hospitable to changing interpretations, in which something can always be found which hasn't been noticed or stressed before. This can apply to the re-readings of individuals over time as well as to shifts of taste and pre-occupations across generations of readers.'

That all set me to thinking about 'my classics', those books which read so differently each time I pick them up and how I wish I'd read Balzac years ago to benefit from all those multiple readings, then I feel a mild sense of panic, does anyone else?
So many good books still to be read.
But take heart because I've managed a Parisian link with tonight's stocking filler prize draw, don't miss it whatever you do.

Sulphuric Acid by Amelie Nothomb

I was just doing that stroll around the shelves thing when my eyes lit on the Literature in Translation section. This sounds a bit pretentious but a while back it seemed like a category I needed to establish, books filed by original language and it's proved invaluable. I spend a lot of time there, stroking the Joseph Roth collection for a start and then he segues into my growing collection of dear old Adelbert Stifter.I'm not quite ready for the mittel-European melancholy just yet, that only seems to happen once the woodburner is lit, but my eye did stray to the French shelf. There I spyed a couple of unread Amelie Nothomb's and suddenly I knew Amelie was just the reading filip I needed. Amelie's writing puts a real spring in my reading step, I know it will be off kilter, a wry and subversive look at the foibles of society Amelie-style, oh yes please. Somone who can pull the plug on all the pretensions of a civilized world, you bet.
I discovered Amelie Nothomb in the early days of dovegreyreader scribbles and went quite overboard with a gluttonous self-indulgent feast of reading, quickly got a grip and realised these books were a precious resource for those  moments in life when you need to read something so completely different from the usual, and managed to save a couple for later.
Later being now and so it was time for Sulphuric Acid. 

The premise for Sulphuric Acid sounds truly terrible now I have to repeat it here, but this is Amelie Nothomb and Amelie has that wicked way of pushing the boundaries of bad taste in the interests of making her point, she sets out to shock and never fails. Except somehow she gets away with it. Her subject for dissection is reality TV shows and when I tell you that Amelie's is called Concentration and the subjects are just grabbed off the street and incarcerated for a year in what is effectively an actual concentration camp, with guards, beatings, starvation, death marches the lot then you will realise that Amelie doesn't mess about when she wants to make a point. Numbers are tattoed on wrists and the purgatory begins for the inmates and all watched daily on TV by the eager millions creating astronomical and ever-increasing viewing figures.

I read Amelie Nothomb in a state of unknowing and often confusion, emerging at the other end in one of two moods, either 'that was amazing' or 'what on earth was that all about?'. Neither mood ever leaves me disappointed and despite the seemingly thinner layers to Sulphuric Acid, what you see seems to be what you get, a blatant potshot at the voyeuristic side of society, I still turned the final page knowing and loving the fact I'd been Amelie-d.

My Grandmother by Fethiye Cetin

It's another tear-jerker I'm afraid, yet another book with a page-blurring moment so either I'm going soft in my old age or getting blepharitis or these books are touching a chord.
My Grandmother A Memoir by Fethiye Cetin and published by Verso is a little book with a huge heart and an even bigger theme. As Fethiye recounts her grandmother's life, and in this beautiful translation by Maureen Freely, you realise that you are witnessing the struggles of a selfless and most extraordinary woman. A life that you can rejoice in for the sheer depth of fiesty determination to survive and the compassion for others born of that experience.
For most of her life Seher a Muslim, has concealed her true Christian Armenian identity from her family. Having watched the massacre of those closest to them, Heranus ( Seher's real name) and her mother and brother undertake the forced death march in 1915. Seized from her mother by a Turkish gendarme Heranus is then adopted into his family and separated from her own for ever. It is many years later that she divulges this truth to Fethiye and reveals that she thinks some of the family may have escaped to America all those years ago and might it be possible to trace them?
Acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide remains a very dangerous and difficult topic to write about within a country that maintains it never happened and, whilst not wishing to even speculate on something of which I know so little, it still becomes essential to acknowledge the courage and conviction of Fethiye Cetin to write and publish this book. Fethiye is a Turkish human-rights lawyer who campaigns fearlessly for the ongoing advocacy of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and there is little doubt of her commitment to the cause when you read My Grandmother.
The facts as told to Fethiye are presented rationally and unjudgementally, she does indeed cut right through any bitter political territory to tell her Grandmother's story, and it is left to the reader to make the call.
It is not difficult to hear the voice, in fact the heart-rending cries of those who were silenced.
In her excellent and informative introduction Maureen Freely clearly outlines the political situation in a way that Fethiye Cetin for obvious reasons cannot, it's chilling to read and illuminates in stark reality the depth of Fethiye's courage in the face of great danger but also great hope in writing this book,

'Despite the dangers it (ie the democracy movement) faces from what she has called 'obscure forces', she remains confident that democratisation, though slow, jagged and dangerous, cannot be checked.'

Now I recall that excellent account of the genocide in Prince Rupert's Teardrop by Lisa Glass and I will read that passage again in the light of this book. My Grandmother is one of those important books, a brave account of a remarkable and formidable woman, a life which is, despite the early sadness, a joy to read about and one which truly deserves to be remembered.
Maureen Freely will be speaking about Fethiye Cetin's book My Grandmother at Ways With Words, Dartington on Saturday July 12th at 12 noon and of course I'll be there.

Benny & Shrimp - Katarina Mazetti

Now Kurt's taken me to Sweden might as well hang around on my Around the World in Eighty Books challenge and see what's selling.
I suppose it's difficult to predict whether a best-seller in another country will do likewise elsewhere, all a bit of gamble, but Benny & Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti the second fiction title for Short Books, has a great deal going for it after taking Sweden by storm. The themes of grief and loss, love and incompatibility, translate well into any language and I'm sneaking it into Around the World in Eighty Books because everyone knows you travel to Australia via Sweden.
Whilst visiting her husband's minimalist grave, librarian Shrimp notices the grave alongside,

' Next to Orjan's stone there's a really tasteless gravestone, an absolute monstrosity. White marble with swirly gold lettering; angels, roses, birds, words on garlands of ribbon, even a salutary little skull and scythe..'

and visiting that very grave with equal regularity and gravitas is bachelor farmer Benny who is mourning the loss of his parents.
Shrimp is not really approaching all this in the way she feels she should

'I always sit her for at least an hour. Presumably in the hope of getting down to the right sort of grieving if I stick at it long enough. I'd feel better if I could feel worse...the truth is, half the time all I feel is furious with him. Bloody deserter, why couldn't you watch where you were going? And my feelings the rest of the time are, I suppose, pretty much like those of a child who had a budgie for twelve years and then it died, There I've said it.'

Meanwhile Benny sits and contemplates Shrimp

' and that gravestone she sits staring at! What sort of a stone do you call that? It looks like something a surveyor put down as a boundary marker! '

An unlikely friendship develops between the two and chapters alternately recount the same events from each other's point of view. The book is well written in translation, ultimately gently humourous and all without taking itself too seriously but also explores the impossibilities of 'getting a relationship to work between two mature single people, driven by enormous longing and loudly ticking biological clocks.'

If opposites attract then here's the evidence that the attraction is not without its difficulties

' How will she learn to accept that he falls asleep at the opera and has a house full of his mother's embroidered wall-hangings, and how could he ever feel at home in her minimalist apartment, bare as a dentist's waiting room? '

I'm impressed with Short Books first foray into fiction, Benny & Shrimp and Betsy Tobin's Ice Land suggest a promising and varied selection of novels nicely produced, soft touch that I am for a book that looks and feels good before I've opened it. But then we all know it then requires the right words on the page in the right order and if they can keep up this standard these will be books worth looking out for. Benny & Shrimp is indeed quirky, unusual and very readable and you have to marvel at Katarina Mazetti, a multi-talented author who having been a teacher is also a commentator, musician, poet and radio programme producer in her native Sweden.
450,000 Swedes thought this book was worth reading and we'll make that plus one Brit too.

The Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector

Looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf
Thus is the twenty-four year old Jewish Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector described soon after writing her first novel Near to the Wild Heart published in 1944.
It's taken quite a while for The Hour of the Star to sink in, settle down and for any thoughts to rise to the surface. I think it was the comparisons to Kafka that delayed me.
I'd already confessed to knowing diddly squat about Kafka and somehow thought that the emphasis everywhere on this aspect of Clarice Lispector's writing and my inability to make Kafkaesque connections beyond existential goings-on and didn't a man wake up and think he was a cockroach or something, well, somehow it all seemed to prohibit comment.
Then by accident I was browsing a book of essays by John Fowles, Wormwood, and I came across his thoughts on Kafka and I felt a whole lot better. John Fowles had studied Kafka at Oxford twenty years previously but now couldn't recall a word of it. Interestingly and off at a tangent he also identifies other authors who have been given 'adjectival value', among them Trollope, Hardy, and James and usually in the context of intense focus on limited areas of human experience or feeling.
That somehow focused my thinking on Clarice Lispector and the scary word Kafka was banished.
Taking as her subject Macabea, a girl from the slums of Rio de Janeiro who moves to the city to work as typist, Clarice Lispector, from the perspective of a male narrator, proceeds to construct her character before the eyes of her reader.

'It is my intention, as I suggested earlier to write with ever greater simplicity. Besides the material at my disposal is all too sparse and mundane, I possess a few details about my characters and those details are not very revealing; details that stem from me only to return to me; the craft of carpentery.'

Constantly reminded of the process as it is happening makes for unusual reading and a strange suspense as you wonder quite what Macabea's character or life will be invested with next.Hovering with indecision is common as Clarice Lispector plays out authorial thoughts mediated through her narrator and all in front of her reader.

'I suspect that this lengthy preamble is intended to conceal the poverty of my story, for I am apprehensive. Before this typist entered my life, I was a reasonably contented chap despite my limited success as a writer. Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting.'

It's often almost impossible to unravel Clarice Lispector from her unnamed male protagonist or from Macabea and so as I read I was constantly asking myself questions and realised I was most certainly reading a book that stripped bare to the bones the art of fiction, a point neatly made by translator Giovanni Pontiero in his afterword,

'Her asides to the reader, as distractions, uncertainties and obstacles interrupt the creative process, underline the attendant problems as the writer struggles for direction and clarification.'

It's very strange. I just know I've read a really unusual and interesting book but beyond that I can't quite define it. There is more Clarice Lispector to read and and I'm onto it, others are reading her around the blogworld and so expect some good reviews to appear  but all in all what a great reading discovery, last words to Clarice who somehow reduces this whole writing caper down to the lowest yet most important common denominator,

'Remember that, no matter what I write, my basic material is the word. So this story will consist of words that form phrases from which there emanates a secret meaning that exceeds both words and phrases.'

I think I've been Lispectored, which probably sounds better than being Trolloped.

 

Rebellion

I knew you wouldn't be cross about a little detour, wouldn't begrudge me a moment of reading indulgence.
How could I leave Europe without a last Joseph Roth to see me on my way?
Michael Hofmann reveals in his introduction to Rebellion that all fifteen of Joseph Roth's novels are finally translated into English and available. Not all in a matching set because the publishers are various.
I've been swathed in Max Sebald's melancholy wanderings but surprisingly they don't leave me feeling weighed down under a burden of persecution and misery. There must be a lightness to Sebald's step because it doesn't depress me, in fact quite the opposite. There is something strangely uplifting about his writing that I haven't quite put my finger on yet.
Perhaps it's the way Max Sebald ignites my own trains of thought to follow and meander off from his own?
A catalyst for all sorts of diversions and I think it may be the imagination that is fired on all cylinders, permission granted by Sebald to wander off and explore in a new light? Terry Pitts has certainly proved this over at Vertigo and I now see exactly how, because I find one Sebald suggestion can lead to hours of focused thinking, reading and listening.
Anyway I could afford a bit of Rothian mittel-European melancholy that was for sure, except that Rebellion is for the first two thirds at least Joseph Roth with his laughing hat on.
It's hardly funny that Andreas Pum has returned from the Great War with half a leg missing and only a medal and a permit to play the hurdy gurdy on street corners to show for it.He is effectively licensed to beg and that's what he proceeds to do whilst pondering that really what he needs to do is find himself a wife.
The wife and child is duly appropriated with unseemly haste from a widowhood of just days with an emotional rendition of Lorelei beneath her window.Perhaps Andreas should have been on his guard with that first gift from the plump and lovely Frau Blumich.
A donkey to help you tow your barrel organ around perhaps not the best wedding present in the world but Frau Blumich had very definite ideas about what she looked for in a husband,

'a bird whose wings had already been clipped, because that would be easier to keep and required less in the way of strenuous training.'

As for social class she had a clear view of that requirement too,

'His class was actually fairly immaterial, seeing as Frau Blumich thought it more practical to raise a creature from the lower sphere into her own, rather than suffer herself to be pulled aloft. That would have enjoined her to be grateful, and her authority would have been eroded as a consequence. And of course the paramount thing in a household is the authority of the woman running it.'

But it is inevitable that Andreas's good fortune will reach its sell-by date and an unfortunate encounter with the police and the interminable wheels of the justice system find him with some time on his hands.Time in which to reassess his life and there follows Joseph Roth (and Michael Hofmann) at his most prosaic and accessible.
Having now read a magnificent seven of the fourteen novels that I have, I think Rebellion might be an excellent book to start with if you are new to Joseph Roth. Eminently readable, and you know you are in the hands of a gifted writer and translator. I have to keep adding that because there must be many a slip twixt German and English.
To Foreignize or Domesticate the subject of an interesting piece by Robert Chandler in the latest newsletter from One World Classics. Despite a dislike of the words themselves, Robert Chandler acknowledges their usefulness in demonstrating the contradictory pulls felt by the translator,

'I mistrust any translator who doesn't feel both of these pulls. On the one hand, we want to bring a work into English in order to make it accessible; on the other hand, it may well be something about the work's otherness that attracted us to it in the first place. There may be little point in our translating it unless we can preserve some of its otherness.'

I think plenty of otherness remains in this translation of Rebellion, Joseph Roth on his third novel and perhaps approaching some of his best writing. This book absolutely makes you want to read much more, in fact why not the whole lot as Michael Hofmann suggests?

The Emigrants

Faced now with an abundance of W.G.Sebald's writing it was a question of where to begin and The Emigrants seemed like a perfect end to another special reading year and the beginning of a new one, when I shall be In Pursuit of Sebald at every opportunity.This is travel, time, memory, experience, displacement and more all between two covers.
W.G.Sebald it would seem was generally accepted to be a Nobel Laureate in the making and perhaps it's a sadness to deal with and dispel early on in my reading of him, because as you read you can only begin to think what literary greatness he would have gone on to had his life not been abruptly cut short by the road accident in East Anglia in December 2001 at the age of fifty-seven.
Thus, at the rate I'm feasting, my abundance could rapidly become a famine. What we have is what there is and the richness of Sebald's writing strikes me as a distilled and finely refined oeuvre, why covet more when it just may possibly have diluted that which is there to be savoured?
Savoured time and again too because it's already clear that Sebald's writing is multi-layered and will bear repeated readings.I am also acutely aware, having listened to this interview with Sebald, that I am but a novice, and one reading his work with a vast innocence and naivity that is waiting to become informed. There is so much contained therein and I will doubtless tumble into many of the usual pitfalls.
I usually spot emperor's new clothes a mile away and I have no sense of that with Sebald, but I am mindful of a critical piece by one of my favoured translators, Michael Hofmann, who is not a fan and finds Austerlitz 'inevitably trite'.
More about that soon but I am quickly discovering that I do need my wits about me to read Sebald.
The Emigrants documents the lives of  four twentieth century Jewish emigres.
The writing is sober, melancholy (the covers are monochrome, hurrah) unconsoling, restrained, meditative, name that word and it applies and Sebald uses countless devices to assist in the telling of his stories.
A diary facilitates a return to a past shrouded in silence, dreams constantly blur the thin veil between reality and truth, embedded photographs allow a picture to tell the story, a snapshot of a moment captured and preserved.I suspect the narrator should not always be assumed to be Sebald yet so often you feel sure it's him, and there is a constant blurring of the narrative voice as the reader shares in the crossing of boundaries between past and present with the narrator and the character.
Acres of silent history, the unspoken, the unsayable are slowly traversed and glimpses revealed and often the narrator will return to the location many years later as if to verify the memories and offer himself and thus the reader confirmation. Sebald notoriously scorned holocaust writing and preferred to challenge the silence that he observed amongst his German countrymen in true Emily Dickinson fashion.
Well he might not have made that exact connection but I was bound to, it's one of my favourites.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Embedded photographs perhaps the most startling method of enticing a reader to immerse themselves at several different levels with the text, visual, imaginative, speculative as you look carefully and try to pick up the clues from the surrounding narrative.
What exactly does the author want me to see in this picture?
At a very fundamental level, is this picture genuine?
They are often grainy and indistinct, do they offer truth or lead me further into the fiction?
There is a moment in the final story, Max Ferber, when I had been led through one character's story in great depth to the point when I  knew them well, then I turned the page and there it was, a photograph apparently of Luisa Lanzberg, looking right at me, a stunningly yet quietly beautiful woman, is this really Max's mother? I was stopped in my reading tracks yet again.
And then that final moment when the tables are turned, the device is reversed in the final paragraphs of the book with a detailed description of a photograph,

'The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady a relentless gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women's names were...'

I frantically turn the page, desperate to see this picture, and it's not there.
I feel slightly cheated out of something that should have been mine, taunted by the blank pages and suddenly I am left with a strange mood that descends unbidden, a yearning for something denied, and in that instant I understand, completely and utterly, exactly what the emigrants themselves and this book have been trying to tell me.

Brigitta

There's no doubt, it is an unusual name for Devon and one that seems to cause much mirth and merriment here when I ask "who's moved my Adalbert Stifter?" I make no apology for more Adalbert because I've just finished Brigitta from the volume of stories of the same title and am starting to agree with Thomas Mann.
Is that a good thing? I know I've never finished The Magic Mountain, but I've always meant to.
Stifter, according to Thomas Mann, was 'one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature.'
As the translator of this volume Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly elaborates, in 1852 Stifter himself explained that

'he chose to describe small scale events and gradual happenings rather than large-scale violent ones because such gradual happenings demonstrate the forces that govern the world more clearly than do the violent ones.'

This in some part contributing to a general misunderstanding of Stifter's writing and pigeon-holing him as a 'charming chronicler of the countryside.'
I was reminded of Henry James's remarks about that 'horse-faced bluestocking' George Eliot as I started to read Brigitta, a woman whose beauty is most certainly inner rather than outer as the story begins with some of Stifter's traditional preliminary analytical scene-setting

'The face of an ugly person often has for us an inner beauty, which we cannot relate then and there to any intrinsic value, while the features of another, of which everyone says that they possess the greatest beauty, appear to us cold and empty.'

So off we trot with our narrator, on horseback across the Hungarian Steppes to stay on the country estate of an aquaintance, a man he has met on his travels, but one who has struck him as having hidden depths.Living nearby the enigmatic and fiercely independent Brigitta, no oil painting by all accounts, unloved as a child, unlucky in love and marriage and now managing her own neighbouring estate with a skill and energy to match any man.
To tell more would be to spoil, but I didn't guess the twist until the final few pages but yet again as I turned the final page I knew I'd read a little masterpiece. Like Abdias, another of Stifter's fine exercises in seeing with the heart not just the eyes. The unamed narrator makes countless visual misjudgements, distance, objects, identity and it is Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly who pointed that out to me, plus the fact that the expected first person narrative directness and immediacy is not evident, Stifter cleverly keeping his narrator and his reader a step removed from events
' the narration is as much a veil as it is a window.'

Having bandied the word novella around for years and decided it was just a short novel I'm also intrigued about the actual definition of what is known in German literature as novellen.Character, incident, theme all focused on a single issue of great significance.
'The scene is set in the recognisable world but casts a lurid light on that world'.
I hadn't really fully appreciated that before.
It all adds much more to the reading and explains the slightly intangible unexplainable feelings that remain when you have read one.
It's a concentrated mood as much as anything and it lingers.
All this adds up to yet another memorable read and one I would surely have missed but for the arrival of this book from Angel Classics.
Looking forward to as much Adalbert as the translators have translated and thanks to Mark Thwaite for flagging up the W.G.Sebald connection. I'm exploring that alongside the only critical study of Adalbert Stifter that I can find in English. Long out of print so many thanks to Marlborough College library for throwing out Adalbert Stifter, A Critical Study by Martin & Erika Swales thus enabling me to snap it up on Amazon Marketplace for just a few pounds. Money well-spent I think because I now want to know all there is to know about Adalbert.

Adalbert Stifter

The writers become increasingly obscure as my Nineteenth Century Rehab post-Booker therapy takes me deeper and deeper into unknown but very exciting mittel European book territory.
Amongst the books from Angel Classics some excellent discoveries and names unknown to me so I've made a start with Adalbert Stifter (1805 -1868).
Thomas Mann described him as

'one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature.'

thus making his current invisibility even more surprising.
Perhaps, like Irmgard Keun, a resurgence is imminent as I discover Pushkin Press will be adding to the available work of Adalbert Stifter next year and Brigitta, the book I'm reading also readily available.Let's hope his Amazon ranking of 1,575,263 takes a turn for the better because it deserves to.
Austrian writer, poet and painter born in Bohemia.
By all accounts a sad life, but you begin to wonder how possible happiness was in those days, impossible to judge by present-day expectations.
His father was crushed to death by an overturned wagon when Adalbert was twelve but thanks to his grandfather, Adalbert's education continued and he studied Law at the University of Vienna.After a five year courtship his marriage to Fanny, the true love of his life, was forbidden by her parents so he settled for the beautiful but uneducated Amalia. Finding themselves childless they tried to adopt Amalia's neices but one ran away and another disappeared and turned up drowned in the Danube four weeks later.
Adalbert became a tutor to the aristocrats of Vienna and was held in high esteem there at least and gradually established a profitable writing career.Sadly life and his liver went into a terminal decline and with it his mental faculties until finally Adalbert slashed his throat with a razor at the age of sixty-three.He died two days later which doesn't bear thinking about and is probably best glossed over.
So there you have the man and with no expectations about his writing I embarked on Brigitta, a book of novellas translated by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly and the first story Abdias.

I quickly realise that this is where Stifter explores those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The stuff of life and what it can throw at you.

'For the ancients this was fate, frightful, final, inflexible cause of events, farther than which one can see and beyond which nothing more exists, so that even the gods themselves are subject to it: for us it is destiny, therefore something sent by a higher power which we should accept. The strong submit to it humbly, the weak rebel against it complainingly, and the base are dully amazed when the monstrous occurs, or go mad and commit crimes.'

The scene is set for us to follow the life of the Jew Abdias, now a stooped ninety-year-old figure sitting outside his house day after day.

Set initially in Africa and later in Europe, Abdias is born into a wealthy trading family living in the desert lands beyond the Atlas Mountains.Cosseted and pampered by his mother, his father has the right but slightly misdirected idea and eventually pushes him out into the world with just a camel and gold coin and parting words along the lines of 'don't come back until you've sussed it.'

'since man owns nothing in the world apart from what he acquires for himself and what he can acquire for himself again at any moment, and since nothing makes us secure except this ability to acquire, go out now and learn it.'

It is fifteen years before Abdias returns, rich in both gold and life experience and all constantly put to the test for the rest of his days. Arguably chronically emotionally wounded by it all Abdias is both wily and ruthlessly cunning, but equally capable of deep love and quiet, gentle emotion and this is never so evident as when he is left to raise his baby daughter.
On occasion fate deals him a seemingly good hand and it is fascinating to surmise on all this as you read, because good hands for Abdias so often hold promises of woe. However I suspect it was a genuine royal flush the day that the only animal nearby when the baby needed feeding was a lactating donkey.
I had always understood that donkey milk was the closest in composition to human milk, more so than cow's milk, so little Ditha was lucky indeed and here's startling evidence to confirm.
There is certainly an overwhelming and melancholy sadness to the story, a sense of lives tossed around helplessly in the storm, but it is beautifully crafted. Underlying elements of vision and ways of seeing prevail as the story unfolds and as the translator suggests in the introduction

'if one sees with the eyes only, one is blind.One must see with the heart'

Stifter cleverly suggests that readers suspend judgement on Abdias and in the end I didn't feel like passing any at all on a man who had lived the life he was given and dealt with whatever it threw at him to the best of his ability.
What more can be asked of any of us?

Angel Classics

I'm having more reading pleasure than can be good for a blogger right now and I'm going to stay with the theme of literature in translation because suddenly my cup runneth over.
I hadn't heard of Angel Classics until I fell into a book evening up at Chagford back on a lovely summer's evening being held to celebrate the 15th edition of Slightly Foxed, the literary magazine with a difference but one that is doing what I love to do.
Flagging up the books we may have missed but which deserve an audience.
It was a perfectly bookish evening and I had a lovely chat with Slightly Foxed editor Hazel Wood and finally the word 'blogging' was uttered. Hazel blanched a fraction but coped well with the onslaught and up came the subject of reading preferences.
Give me some good, solid mittel European melancholy with a bit of crumbling Habsburg, some fin-de-siecle Vienna thrown in and it will keep me quiet for hours.
Literature in translation, yes more more, bring it on.
So I was all ears as Hazel told me about Mr Hazel's (Anthony) independent publishing company Angel Classics who specialize in just that, Russian, German, Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croat, it's all in there.I pleaded for details which Hazel (having taken this long to recover I suspect ) sent last week and I was onto Anthony Wood in a flash.
I'd read Fraulein Else by Arthur Schnitzler in the Pushkin Press edition but hadn't found any more so I'm delighted to have his Selected Short Fiction lined up, "some of the most subtle and haunting twentieth-century explorations of inner lives."
Being incorrigibly nosey I want background on the man too. How could he write such a chillingly revealing little book about a woman as Fraulein Else?
There is a great introduction to Selected Short Fiction by the translator J.M.Q.Davies which will capably inform my reading and hopefully my thinking here when I've read them.
I've dipped in and out of The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek over the years and how can you not love the only loyal Czech in the Austrian army of 1914, the little man versus the bureaucracy?
'Fighting officialdom with the only weapons available to him - passive resistance, subterfuge, native wit and dumb insolence.'
The Bachura Scandal & other stories and sketches by Jaroslav Hasek a selection of pre-Svejk writing showing quite what a 'humorist and satirist of a rare order' Hasek was.These stories of pre-1914 Czech life look set to impress.
Hugo Hofmannsthal, not only Richard Strauss's librettist but also turning his eye to the restless spirit of fin-de-siecle Vienna and surrounded by a veritable Who's Who host of contemporaries, Mahler, Klimt, Freud et al.Selected Tales a slim volume that I suspect contains a powerful horde of lesser-known writing.
Finally I probably had to give The Silver Dove, by Andrey Bely a whirl, just because.
But also because, published in 1910, it is considered to be the first modern Russian novel and that sounds intriguing. A disillusioned Moscow poet joins a rural mystic set The Silver Doves, led by a bit of a Rasputin-esque figure. This is a culture on the brink and one that knows that to survive it must heed the 'formless strivings and undisciplined imaginings of the common people.' Of course we all know what happened next.
I am intrigued and will be back with early thoughts very soon.
I'm also going to have a foray into the land of Pushkin where I've never been before so all offers of hand-holding welcome, any Pushkin-ites out there?

Irmgard v Irene

A perceptive commentator on here last week flagged up that English foible we seem to have of only feeling the need to speak one language and expecting everyone else to speak it too.
It is to my eternal regret that I was put into a Latin class on the assumption that being good at French meant I'd go to University and would need Latin more than German.
The logic of this thinking has always eluded me, as has just about all my Latin (apart from the odd medical term like mane and nocte) most of my French, as did University etc etc and it would have been far more use, with apologies to Miss Vanstone my Latin teacher (who has found me here and stops by with her red pen every so often) to have found myself in Frau Schamasch's German class.
Never is this more obvious than when I start to research the background to a writer like Joseph Roth and now Irmgard Keun.It's all out there but it's all in German and therefore inaccessible to me.
I was completely steam-rollered by Irmgard Keun's The Artificial Silk Girl on first reading.
Doris one of the saddest and most memorable of characters and the book a prescient foreshadowing and darkly foreboding account of life in Berlin between the wars. The writing was on the wall and read with innocence by Doris, but with the addition of hindsight with great clarity by any reader, thus making the book even more startling. So I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked up After Midnight, published in Amsterdam in 1937.
Since 1933 her books had been banned and confiscated by the Nazis and Irmgard Keun was in exile, but having a romantic relationship with Joseph Roth. They travelled extensively across Europe together and who knows quite how Joseph Roth may have influenced the writing of After Midnight as Irmgard Keun writes,

'There have been too many atrocities.One dreadful day revenge will come, and it won't be divine revenge, it will be even more atrocious, more human, more inhuman, And that atrocious revenge which I both desire and fear will necessarily be followed by another atrocious revenge, because the thing that has begun in Germany looks like going on without any hope of an end. Germany is turning on her own axis, a great wheel dripping blood'

Irmgard Keun's courageously and transparently honest writing style is immediately evident and what followed was a book I had to read in a single sitting.Hers is a prophetic lone voice and through nineteen year old Susanne's detailed fictional portrayal of everyday life in urban Germany in the years immediately before the war, possibly a far more telling account of the insidious effects of Fascism than any explicit account of atrocities.
Told at a slant, the fear and the oppression, the anti-semitism and the deceit that had become part of everyday life seem even more shocking. Susanne's life spent looking over her shoulder, with no sense of who to trust and the constant fear of saying the wrong thing is beautifully expressed in an analogy that was bound to appeal to me

'My head's full of confused, random thoughts, like a ball of wool I must knit into words. I must knit a stocking of words. It takes so long, and I forget what I was going to say a minute ago, as if I'd dropped a stitch.'

Eventually you understand why, with her friends, she becomes as  'disconsolate as unredeemed pawnbroker's pledges' , eventually 'weary to my inmost soul' and  finally fleeing the country, surely Susanne's fears of exile mirroring those of Irmgard Keun herself?

'The roofs that you see are not built for you. The bread that you smell is not baked for you. And the speech that you hear is not spoken for you.'

Those understated obervations arguably the most powerful expression possible at the loss of homeland and much more besides.
As I read I was, as always, aware that inbetween my reading and Irmgard Keun's writing lay the hand of the translator and my thoughts turned to wondering quite what magic one of my favourites, Michael Hofmann might work on the writing of Irmgard Keun? His translations of Joseph Roth are matchless.
Thence to wondering why Irmgard Keun isn't up there with Irene Nemirovsky right now?
She may have survived the war but who can begin to imagine the fear engendered as Irmgard Keun feigned suicide, returned to Nazi Germany in 1940 and lived there under cover until the end of the war?
Apart from The Artificial Silk Girl the few books written are out of print or not translated.
Imagine then my delight as I sauntered through Amazon to discover that Penguin are publishing Child of All Nations by Irmgard Keun in January 2008 translated by none other than Michael Hofmann.
Joy should definitely be unconfined because in his hands expect to be hearing much more about Irmgard Keun any day.

In the Wake - Per Petterson

I used to be quite disciplined about the six books I have on the go at any one time and it has always worked perfectly for me, but with so many books arriving I struggle to keep my hands off them instantly and soon I'm in a mess with about ten half-reads scattered around the house.This still seems reasonable because I know of some people who stop by here who have about seventy-three on the go.
Then I carry them all around the house because who knows what may strike me as perfect for the next available reading slot in my day?
I've restored a bit of good old fashioned matron's order to the ward, the bed wheels are all facing the front and I am back on my six...for a while.
Last week I picked up a book I had bought back at Houston airport in July.
I was totally captured by Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, so In the Wake seemed like a good addition to my fast-growing Nordic shelf. This is actually the Picador UK cover, sorry the US one I have is dire not very good by comparison, I'm amazed I bought it actually.
I suspect Per Petterson is cornering the market for the introspective Nordic male with big life issues to resolve because here the theme repeats itself, but sufficiently differently (can you say that? Is it a legal combination of words? I'd hate to have the grammar police blue-lighting in) as to be of new interest.
Arvid Jansen is our man, he's a writer, he's had a rough ride and this is where Per Petterson excels because you get outcomes of rough ride instantly but you only discover quite how rough in little narrative drips as the book proceeds and protagonist starts to recover and to reclaim his sanity and his life.
So two stories, one going forwards, one going backwards.
I think I'm making this about as clear as mud, but then Arvid's a bit hazy about a great deal in the beginning so reader clarity only possible when Arvid starts to get a grip.
Now I think I may have made things worse.
It's a telling and intuitive account of grief, guilt, families and how to survive them, tragedy, love, loss, solace and comfort, all the usual themes but wrapped up in the character of a writer who perhaps sees life differently.

'I am writing myself into a possible future'

Arvid is also a writer who reads and frequently conveys the power of the written word of others in his life.Often references to books he has read in the past and how just the recollection recreates the mood, a theme I warmed to instantly because I know it well and I expect you do too.In Arvid's case those recollections often straws to be clutched at in moments of sheer desperation.
There are some acutely revealing moments in the book and Per Petterson's writing has the power to make you stop and think and visualise constantly.A passing moment when Arvid visits his father in hospital and sees the strong man of his life crying that had me in shreds. Simply written but hugely evocative imagery and the title takes on new resonance once you've turned the final page.
Finally let's not forget to thank Anne Born for her translations of In the Wake and Out Stealing Horses, thus bringing some of the best of Norwegian fiction to my doorstep and possibly yours when it may otherwise have stayed pining in the fjords.
And in case anyone from Norway visits let's thank them too and before anyone gasps and says they didn't know I was fluent in Norwegian, I cheated.
If you cut and paste you will see that this virtual translation thing is a load of old rubbish, much of my original sentiment about Norway having fjords, Grieg and making Per Petterson a National Treasure seems to have been lost.The living breathing translators out there have absolutely nothing to fear.

Denne er en briljant bestille og noen lever inne Norge er ikke alene men også meget heldig å har den fjords Edvard Sorg og Likemann Gynt bortsett fra likeledes Per Petterson. Hvis du har ikke fremstilt seg en Nasjonal Skatt du må gjøre så denne øyeblikk fordi vi ville hvis han var ours.We kunne gjøre med noen få til Nasjonal Kostbarheter fordi vi har en stor ledig stilling der hvor David Beckham pleide være.

Joseph Roth day

Spring forward, fall back, and that day when the clocks return the hour they took away earlier in the year feels like a horse of a gift that must not be looked in the mouth.
This time round I decided to read a whole book in a day and there's really only one writer who I could think of who would fit the bill.
It suddenly needed to be someone who exuded a definitive sense of time and place, atmosphere and emotion and  I felt a little smattering of autumnal mittel European melancholy was called for. Only one person in that case, and as I have plenty of Joseph Roth still to read he was an obvious choice.Thoughts about my introduction to the writing of Joseph Roth here and subsequently here , there and everywhere and I sense a hint of an addiction now I look at all those.
There are moments when only the strangely complex simplicity of Joseph Roth will do and as I scoured the shelves I settled on Job The Story of  a Simple Man (translated with huge sensitivity by Dorothy Thompson) for my post-equinoxial and pre-solsticial read. As I turn the final page I'm lost for words again as was Thomas Mann, so I'm in good company and hardly dare tread where Thomas felt unable to.

'It is not possible to do justice to its poetic subtlety, but I can vouch for its extraordinary literary merits'

Mendel and Deborah Singer and their children live in abject poverty in the ghettos of Tsarist Russia. They are a law-abiding and god-fearing family, observant in the orthodoxies of the Jewish faith, allowing it to gently dictate the rhythms of their life. A fourth child Menachim is born and it soon becomes obvious that he has problems.Excruciatingly difficult decisions have to be made as they consider their future.
You will be hard-pushed to find a more emotionally laden book than this one. As the family finally make their way to the streets of New York, tragedy and misfortune strike one after another and, against a backdrop of a world at war, Mendel enters his own dark night of the soul and a conflict with his God.
By turns heartbreaking and uplifting this is one of those books that lingers long after the final turn of the page and to immerse myself in it in almost one sitting through a single day was a treasured reading experience, and it was still only 4pm when I had finished.
I must credit a reviewer on Amazon with the suggestion that the book ends at a point where you'd love it to carry on and I was so immersed in the Singer family that I'd happily read a whole saga on them. I was frequently reminded of Brothers by Bernice Rubens which is effectively exactly that, and for anyone who reads Job and then feels a vast sense of deprivation at the lack of another single page this would make the perfect anodyne.However ignore the first Amazon Brothers reviews, they have got themselves in the most unholy muddle with this book, it is indeed the saga of four generations of the Bindel family from Tsarist Russia.
The search is still on for a comprehensive and readable biography of Joseph Roth written in English, you may have told me before and I might not have been paying attention, but is there one?

Out Stealing Horses

Still a few days left to bring you my most recent reads.
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson and a truly deserving winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2006 and more recently the Impac Dublin Award and in keeping with recent acknowledgments on here mention must also be made of Anne Born's translation from the Norwegian original.Good to see that that translator shares in the prize money for both of these.
Out and about everywhere else long before it made it to the UK last November it would seem, and the book is getting stellar reviews from all quarters.
That can mean but one thing, it was going to have to work doubly hard to impress me.
I hope you put the books I rave about on here under the cosh too, it does them and me no harm and it's so good to get other points of view.
Starting with the cover, I'd say Nordic backwoods perfection barring the use of the words "limpid prose" which always have me cringing slightly.Why do those words annoy me so much? Perhaps because I'm still not sure I'd recognise limpid prose if I trod on it even given definitions such as transparent clearness, pellucid, calm and untroubled, serene.
It's too pretentious by far for this book.
But I really couldn't fault Out Stealing Horses because it's in that snowy, ice-laden melancholy genre that warms the cockles of my heart as if I'd just filled a literary hotwater bottle.
Nothing warm about the far reaches of snowy Norway or the cold, sparse and isolated cabin that Trond has moved to in his latter years as he reflects gently and quietly (alright, limpidly) on his life and the events of his childhood.
"All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this"
The numbing cold interspersed with plenty of warming references to the lighting of the woodburning stove and that sudden pervasion of heat which happens very quickly once it catches, unless it's me lighting it, in which case expect to wait hours. At these moments it was as if Per Petterson was inviting me to draw near and rub my hands together with my mittens under my arm and sit alongside Trond as he told his story.
It's all desperately subtle and understated (OK limpid) and therefore enormously powerful as one man recounts the huge and life-changing events in that almost matter-of-fact way bestowed with increasing age. The invasion of Norway by the Germans, the undercover activities, the dangers, the joys, the tragedies and the infidelities that have shored up Trond's life as he now settles into his final days. Real analogies between him recounting his store of untold memories and the great pile of timber chopped, balanced and stacked ready to be levered into the river and released on its journey.
The atmosphere and sense of place giving so much to a book that demands and allows the reader to be surprised and caught slightly off balance at every turn.
Trond's life gradually unfolds and many questions left hanging in the air, always a good sign I think when a writer doesn't feel obliged to tie up every single loose end, leave a few threads dangling I say unless we're talking about The Bayeux Tapestry.
A fantastic read and one that lingers long after the final page and would allow for frequent re-reads and new discoveries every time.
Limpidly brilliant I suppose.

Stefan Zweig and let's hear it for the translators.

I'm sure there are plenty of writers who can turn out a good story in less than seventy pages but to mind nobody did it better than Stefan Zweig this weekend.
John Self over on Asylum had done a great review of Chess by Stefan Zweig, not only reminding me of the version I have of this, The Royal Game published by Pushkin Press, but also that I had plenty of unread Stefan Zweig on the shelves to catch up on.The Royal Game is one of those unsettling reads that stays in your mind for years.You spot oblique references to it all over the place, others have read and carry it with them too.
One Stefan Zweig title has been beckoning me for ages. In fact so alluring was the title that I had conjured up all manner of plots and content to the point where I had actually put off reading it for fear of disappointment.
Twilight Moonbeam Alley is actually two separate stories but don't the two together conjure up magic therein?
Since I first discovered him I have been fascinated by Stefan Zweig in a Joseph Roth sort of way. Mittel-European, that melancholy wistful feel to the writing, something just out of reach,the unexplainable atmosphere of literature in translation.
Born in 1881 in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family, living in Salzburg between the wars and becoming a rising literary star, Stefan Zweig moved to London during the ascent of Nazism. He took out British citizenship before he finally settled in Brazil where he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide in 1942. By this time he was a banned writer in Hitler's Germany and his books were in ashes.
Twilight is one of the best short stories I've read in ages.First published in 1910 it is set in France and is a strange mixture of the real and the invented.The main characters did exist, Madame de Prie was the mistress of the Duke of Bourbon, Louis XV's prime minister and did broker the king's marriage.She was indeed exiled to the country.
Stefan Zweig then adds in all the imagined and fictional detail and you have a perfect delineation of a woman so full of her own importance that the disintegration is like sitting watching a road accident about to happen.
Moonbeam Alley likewise a compact offering on the agonies of private passions cleverly told to an onlooker who becomes the recipient of probably far more information than he ever wanted to know.His own illusions about the magical nature of this alley of moonbeams as shattered as mine in the end. Once the light has shone on life behind the closed doors it is not quite the dreamy place you had imagined.
The reading was timely because Susan Sontag has more interesting things to say on the subject of translation and I'd just read her lecture on literary translation, The World as India , published in the newest posthumus collection At the Same Time. It has all given me some real gems for thought about a genre I relish.

"It is often taken for granted that the aim of translation is to make the work "sound" as if it were written in the language in which it is being translated...to efface as much as possible the evidence of foreignness"

Susan Sontag cleverly weighs that against the other side of the argument

"The translator's primary duty is to stay as close as possible to the original text with the understanding that the result will, precisely, read as a translation.To naturalise a foreign book is to lose what is most valuable about it: the spirit of the language, the mental ethos out of which the text emerges"

I've simplistically condensed twenty four pages into two quotes, the rest is worth seeking out because perhaps I now understand why some translations seem to fail with me and it is almost certainly because I'm not really aware I'm reading a translation, somehow I need to sense that difference.
I certainly do with anything by Joseph Roth that Michael Hofmann gets his hands on, definitely did with my reading of Colette and Andrew Brown last week and likewise with Stefan Zweig and Anthea Bell at the moment.
Little wonder that I now feel I've been very remiss and must start to credit the translators too.

Métaphysique des tubes de Nothomb

More on Amelie Nothomb, and this week Metaphysique des Tubes or for the rest of us translated as The Character of Rain. My French must be pretty rusty, I'd put money on Metaphysics of Tubes.Wonder how Brillant Comme Une Casserole translates?
Plus I've been doing a bit of background reading on Amelie herself.
At 39 she's older than I had realised, has written over 50 books but only allowed about 20 to be published. This from the Complete Review suggests there is something of a love-hate thing going on and probably the inevitable jealousies that a meteoric rise to star status can incur, sadly you're there to be shot down by one and all, not that I would know you understand.
"The somewhat contentious cult-figure she has become in the Francophone area, a precocious, popular, and telegenic literary star, damned by (some) critics, adored by her public."
I must hastily add this is out of context in the Complete Review big picture as they adore Amelie's writing and after two books I have to confess so do I.

The Character of Rain, a variation on stream of consciousness and the first 3 years in a child's life and another writer firmly touching base with their inner child. The first two years are a memory-less blur of life as a tube, in one end out the other, don't give up at this point even though you may want to, because suddenly Nothomb cleverly delineates the dawning of consciousness and language as the child's world opens up, but very much at their own behest.The acquisition of language is perfectly detailed as is the assumption by the adults that they know what the child is thinking.We've all borne the brunt of the power of the toddler but to see it reflected from the mind of this little person is quite a revelation.They really do feel invincible and godlike in their world, fears are real, obsessions plentiful and often impossible to explain and Amelie Nothomb captures it all simply and,I'm sorry but I have to say it, exquisitely.
A working lifetime spent doing development checks on 2 year olds and she has given me a rare insight into the mysterious workings of their minds that makes complete sense.And just look at that little rascal on the cover, you'll know her well by the end of the book, her face says it all.
In fact Amelie Nothomb really does pull this one off with ease so now I'm starting to worry.The higher the rise the further the fall could be and I desperately don't want it to happen.Let's see about The Book of Proper Names . Craftyperson is hooked too, read how the family starved and gnawed on chair legs while she sat and read Antichrista.Et mon dieu, maintenant elle est reading un livre par Amelie dans French par ce que it is n'est pas available dans English yet.
Meanwhile I'm sure I probably agree with this...at least I think I do. Mrs Mitchell's O Level French lessons circa 1969, she always said I should pay more attention.
"L'inaltérable succès d'Amélie Nothomb prouve qu'elle a eu raison de naître Dieu et de s'inventer écrivain. Comme les carpes insatiables du jardin japonais, nous avalons ses mensonges avec délice." - Hugo Marsan, Le Monde (1/9/2000)

Japanese Stupeur et Tremblements

I first heard of Amelie Nothomb some years ago over on The Complete Review. This site has long offered a daily resume of what's what in the reading world with an eye on the more unusual books so a good source for the lesser known novel. I set their daily updated Literary Saloon as my home page every so often to keep in touch with it all, they have an ascerbic wit and don't suffer fools gladly in the world of publishing.Then up popped Amelie again in my comments here and that was enough of a prompt to read some.
In size and ambience they remind me of those lovely books by Francoise Sagan that had me addicted in the 1970's. I still have my faded, tatty old collection of Penguin editions when 25p seemed a lot to pay for a book, Bonjour Tristesse, Aimez Vous Brahms, Sunlight on Cold Water. All digestible in one sitting and leaving you with the deep impression that only a book which can be read in this way does, and then of course you want to read them all.

Fear and Trembling was the first one I opened (no I didn't read it in French but you can) and immediately I was plunged into the strange world of Japanese corporate life seen through the eyes of a Westerner and surely a thinly barely disguised account of Amelie Nothomb's own experience? Amelie is employed for a year as the office dogsbody but clearly has talents far in excess of those required. For openers her fluent Japanese causes dismay amongst the clients and she is asked to forget it and pretend she doesn't understand.Humiliated and constantly demoted to increasingly menial tasks as a punishment for showing intuition and common sense beyond the ken of her employers, Amelie spends the final few months of her employment cleaning the toilets.Of course this backfires spectacularly on the occupants of the offices on the 44th floor who are then too embarrassed to use them so have to waste valuable company time trekking off to those on the 43rd floor.It hardly sounds like enough to make a novel but Amelie Nothomb does just that, presenting a world that appears by turns, both funny and ridiculous if it wasn't quite so frighteningly serious and just possibly true.
I have no idea whether this is an accurate representation of Japanese corporate life or a caricature and wonder whether any of my Japanese visitors here might be able to enlighten me?
Whatever, this was a great read and I'm up for more Amelie Nothomb which is fortunate as I bought 4.