Tirza - Arnon Grunberg (translated by Sam Garrett) - Best Translated Book Award 2014

In 2008 I read the epic Man Booker Prize shortlisted “The Northern Clemency” by Philip Hensher. A novel which covered the period 1974-1994, it put a mirror up to a suburban existence, the banality and the slow decay during the Thatcher period. The ordinary was becoming art. Then in 2012 the Man Booker Prize Longlisted “The Yips” by Nicola Barker (another behemoth) explored the extreme oddities that live behind the ordinary suburban doors, agoraphobic tattoo artists, Church of England clergy who are obsessed with their fringe, internet savvy  barmaids and of course more.

Move over English suburbia and a banal existence because Jorgen Hofmeester has arrived, a resident of the best suburb in Amsterdam, so therefore the whole of Holland, our novel opens with him preparing sushi for his daughter’s graduation party. Jorgen’s a successful editor on the translation desk at a publishing house, has a much younger wife, has invested his property income into a Swiss bank account and he simply lives for his two gorgeous daughters. A suburban dream, the story of a man who has arrived. But is it?

Having children was the wife’s idea, to start with. One morning at breakfast, a breakfast which now seems to him as though it was consumed in another lifetime, she had said: “We’re going to have a baby.”

“How can that be?” he’d asked.

And she had replied: “I stopped taking the pill.”

“A baby,” he said. “My God, aren’t there enough of them in the world? And how can you be sure the child will be healthy?”

But all she had said was: “If I’d left it up to you, it would never have happened.”

All morning long the idea had flustered him, but bu the time lunch was over he had decided to shoulder his responsibility. He waited until work was over at five, then cycled to the bank and took out a life-insurance policy, without telling the wife about it. It was to be a surprise, the money the policy would pay out if anything unexpected happened to him.

That, then, was how Jorgen Hofmeester became a father; as a man who knew nothing more about fatherhood and wanted to know nothing more about it than that it was wise to take out life insurance before the child entered the world.

The first 295 pages of this novel take place at youngest daughter Tirza’s graduation party, we have our protagonist , Jorgen, drifting back and forth in time, recalling what happened to his marriage, his tetchy relationship with his eldest daughter Ibi, his dislike of hedge funds, how Tirza’s boyfriend bears a striking resemblance to September 11 ring leader  Mohammed Atta, how Jorgen has been spending his days since the publishing house decided to move him on and of course we learn more of his relationship with Tirza.

This is the party that has to be perfect, that has to prove that the rumors going around about him are not true. How well it has all turned out, that’s what he wants to say, that’s what he wants to get across, how well his life has turned out, how well the children have turned out.

On the surface we have an ordinary family, but as each layer of the onion is peeled back we begin to see a rotten core. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot here, however I will let you know that Jorgen’s relationship with his wife is far from ordinary:

She was standing in front of him. He couldn’t back off, the washing machine was behind him. He could make out the individual pores in her face, the black of her mascara. Maybe she was right, maybe he had been disgusted by her. But disgust was no grounds for divorce, disgust was the zenith of intimacy. The conclusion of intimacy. Its logical conclusion. The familiarity of disgust, the immutability of it, the wistfulness it elicited. The desire to be disgusted by the other person, just one last time. And, with that, to always be a little disgusted by yourself as well.

This novel turns stereotypes on their heads, and no subject seems taboo. We have Jorgen witnessing his eldest daughter having sex with the upstairs tenant, we have Jorgen in intimate liaisons with Tirza’s classmates, we have sexual  game playing, domestic violence and once we move from the party to Africa (where Tirza is to travel with her boyfriend) we have locals turning a blind eye to the tourist sex trade.

And throughout, we have an underlying sexual tension, a creepy distasteful feeling that all is not above board with Jorgen and his relationship with his youngest daughter Tirza, yes, there is an undercurrent of incest. Whilst not explicit, the implication is always there:

He presses her against him and he understands – never before has he understood so clearly, so overwhelmingly, so undeniably – that he wants to have no reason to live without Tirza. Without her, life is no longer conceivable, and what is inconceivable in undesired. She is his right to exist. What he is pressing against him now provides him with both the privilege and the obligation to live. Without her there is no more obligation, but also no more right. He can barely remember how he lived before she was around. Waiting, that’s what it was. That’s how he lived all those years, waiting for Tirza. Of course, he didn’t know then that it was Tirza he was waiting for.

This story is one emotional roller coaster and it is one that will disturb you. The ability to evoke feelings throughout and push you into shame simply by the structure of the language or the subjects being discussed in such an off handed manner is wonderful.

Hofmeester’s mouth is dry. For the first time, he thinks he is able to distinguish between pain and despair. Despair is dull and a bit crippling, alos numbing. Despair is not feeling, it’s the opposite; the awareness that you are no longer feeling, that feelings are in the process of slipping away, of leaving you behind on your own.

This may not be a comfortable journey, in the slightest, but it is a journey into a world of taboo that I’ve taken. One I won’t forget for quite some time. 

The Devil's Workshop - Jachym Topol (translated by Alex Zucker) - Best Translated Book Award 2014

As we know, the world of translated book prizes contains a hefty amount of World War Two fiction, therefore it is no surprise to see this work feature on the longlist for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award. Is it worthy of making the list for the writing, not the subject matter alone?

Welcome to a bleak place, yes a very bleak place. “Terezin, an eighteenth-century fortress town north of Prague that the Gestapo used as a prison and ghetto for Jews in the Second World War.” Our nameless protagonist was brought up in Terezin, his “father” a major in the army, his mother rescued from the mass graves – “my mum never went outside, she needed a room’s edges and corners behind her back, just a tiny space to breathe in was enough.” Just like our small novel, a tiny place where you can hardly breathe, but it’s just enough. We follow our nameless anti-hero as he herds goats, retrieves mementos from the catacombs, is shipped off to prison, and as a loner becomes the escort for the prisoners on death row as they walk to their execution.

The prison directors were amazed that when I walked with the prisoners, they didn’t whimper, didn’t scream wordlessly like animals, didn’t struggle. They were calm and quiet, I suppose because I was calm. My head, my mind, my legs were used to the twists and turns of Terezin’s tunnels, the gloom and concrete of the cells and bunkers, the iron of the bars, so nothing in my body or mind rebelled against the rooms of death, and I didn’t vomit, or pray under my breath, or have nightmares, or break down in tears afterwards, which, I was told, often happened to the jailers who were paid to escort the condemned to their end.

Upon release he returns to Terezin, he needs a place to live, tees up with Lebo, who was born in the concentration camp, all to save the town. And how? Turn it into a living museum, tell the stories of the atrocities to the young eager children that arrive with mum and dad’s credit cards.

She was one of the seekers of the bunks, young people with brains darkened by the cloud of the terrible past, by the horrors that had befallen their parents, grandparents, relatives, or just by the fact that those horrors had happened at all. Could they happen again? What is man capable of? How come it happened to them, but I was spared? What would I have done if it had been me being led to my death? Can it happen again? The seekers turned those morbid questions over and over again in their minds, a demon had taken hold of them, clouding their brains.

This story of Terezin is a dark dark tale, of the atrocities of war, and now the State sanctioned “tourist” approach that flies in the face of the communities that still survive there and have a different story to tell. The first half of our novel delves into the story of Terezin (which is not fictitious) and questions the “tourism”, using Franz Kafka tee shirts overprinted with “If Franz Kafka hadn’t died, they would have killed him here” to make a quick buck. Our protagonist then “escapes” and makes his way to Minsk, Belarus, to assist others with setting up their own “tourism” industry for concentration camps.

You know how many people the Nazis killed in Czechoslovakia?

No, not off the top of my head, but we can easily Google it.

Three hundred sixty-two thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight! And you know how many here is Belarus?

About the same?

She clenches her fist. Shakes her head. Rolls her eyes. She is seriously angry. She actually stamps her feet! She looks like and angry teacher, picking on a kid in class.

I give her the bloody handkerchief back. She shoves it in her pocket. My nose isn’t bleeding anymore. But it’s all stuck together inside.

They killed four million people here. It’s in the Guinness Book of Records! And you know how many people there were in Czechoslovakia and how many in Belarus?

No.

The same. Ten million. But you in the West, you don’t have a clue! Terezin was nothing!

What is she getting so angry about? I guess the dezhurnaya got her upset.

The world never saw camps like we had here is Belarus! Maruska yells.

Maruska!

They say all the death camps were in Poland. That’s bullshit! All the tour operators only go to Auschwitz! But that’s going to change.

Our novel questions that age old problem, when do we consign history to the past? Of course a controversial way to look at things by asking our protagonist to be the instigator, assistor of bigger and better concentration camps memorials, all seeking the external funding and tourist dollar. A concentration camp circus?

Brother – Arthur leans towards me, breathing in my face – you know how many tourists a year come to Belarus?

Three thousand five hundred and something, Maruska answers for me. I have no idea.

It’s high time that changed, Arthur says. Guess who had the most casualties during the war? We did! Guess who had the most people murdered under communism? We did. And guess who still has people disappearing, eh? We do! That’s the division of labour in the globalized world of today, dammit! Thailand: sex. Italy: paintings and seaside. Holland: clogs and cheese. Right? And Belarus? Horror trip, right?

Besides an uncomfortable creep throughout, one that niggles at the reader as some of the harebrained ideas for museums surface, or the commercialism of the horrors becomes a reality, this novel does have a couple of patchy moments. There are a few sections that just appear from nowhere with no adequate explanation and there are quite a few sentences that I reread over and over to understand, sometimes just forgetting them as I moved on – the work of a weak translation or the subtleties of the cryptic tale.

Short sharp sentences, no dwelling on subtleties and conversations that are not marked with "" at times was distracting. However this acerbic style adds to the uncomfortable feel overall. A worthy inclusion on the longlist.

Definitely not a book for those who like it light, but if you’re into World War Two fiction this could be up your alley as it does approach a taboo subject in a very bleak manner.

Seiobo There Below - Laszlo Krasznahorkai (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) - Best Translated Book Award 2014

I have to start this review by stating that this was probably the most difficult novel I have ever read. When you are not a genius, how do you review something composed by a genius? Your insignificant thoughts are mere ramblings compared to the broad sweeping vista of Krasznahorkai’s mind.

Let’s start off by explaining that the chapters are numbered in the Fibonacci sequence (missing 0 and 1) – if you don’t know what the Fibonacci sequence is I suggest you google it and then become even more confused. You’ll find heaps of references to nature, art, Elloitt waves, golden means, you get me? Let’s simply say the chapters are 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144,233,377,610,987,1597 and 2854

These seventeen sections could be easily read as seventeen short stories, as we do not have a common narrator, or character and the sections cover just about the breadth of human existence. The inner sleeve tells me “Seiobo – a Japanese goddess – has a peach tree in her garden that blossoms once every three thousand years; its fruit brings immortality. In “Seiobo There Below”, we see her returning to mortal realms, searching for a glimpse of perfection.“ Now I must have been asleep when I read that section, as my only recollection of Seiobo’s involvement was through a Noh dancer performing as her.

As we know Karsznahorkai creates long winding passages of text, and this work is no different, with single sentences taking up whole chapters and running for thirty–forty pages. Therefore I may well have missed the fact that Seiobo returned to mortal realms, it could well have been squeezed in the middle of a forty page sentence, wall to wall text, no breathing between ramblings, no breaks for the astute reader, just text, text, text and more of the same text, passages that return to their origins and then split off again, for further ramblings.... get what I mean?

What I’m telling you may well lead you away from this amazing work, yes it is difficult, but it is also probably one of the most rewarding and enlightening books I have ever read. An amazing landscape of humanity attempting to define beauty, our eternal search for ultimate bliss, each and every chapter is a further exploration of the nature of perfection, whether through architecture, painting, music, sculpture or an amazing written contribution to perfection? Our welcome is not that open though...

It would be better for you to turn around and go into the thick grasses, there where one of those strange grassy islets in the riverbed will completely cover you, it would be better if you do this for once and for all, because if you come back tomorrow, or after tomorrow, there will be no one at all to understand, no one to look, not even a single one among all your natural enemies that will be able to see who you really are; it would be better for you to go away this very evening when twilight begins to fall, it would be better for you to retreat with the others, if night begins to descend, and you should not come back if tomorrow, or after tomorrow, dawn breaks, because for you it will be much better for there to be no tomorrow and no day after tomorrow; so hide away in the grass, sink down, fall onto your side, let your eyes slowly close, and die, for there is no point in the sublimity that you bear, die at midnight in the grass, sink down and fall, and let it be like that – breathe your last.

Here is a quick summation of the blend which makes up “Seiobo There Below”. We have a heron in a Japanese river who remains perfectly still, an Italian bible crossword telling us that if we solve 54 across we’ll reach a decisive conclusion (“Queen Vashti has done wrong, not only against all the nobles and the peoples of all the provinces of King Xerxes” Esther 1:16), we have references to an Australian skin care website (which if you investigate actually takes you to Arabic articles on liposuction), we have a Persian Queen, Filippo Lippi-Firenze from 1470 an apprentice to Botticelli, Queen Vashti then appears on a wedding chest painted by Lippi (or was it Botticelli).

We have the restoration of a Buddha statue from 1367, recognised for its immortal “one single gaze”, we have a painting of the dead Christ being restored, Christ appears to be wanting to open his eyes. We have a Hungarian tourist visiting the Acropolis totally unprepared, another tourist in Venice who returns to visit a painting of Dead Christ, then an artist who creates “shiro-hannya”, the demon-head mask created for a Japanese Noh play. Flick over to a destitute Romanian who has been tricked into travelling to Spain for work and he stumbles across a mystical gallery where “these angels were real”.

Seiobo is introduced as part of Inoue Kazuyuki’s section, a celebrated Noh dancer who has found the meaning of life:

And he understood everything, and since then he has known that there is no tomorrow; I never think about that – he lowers his voice even more, and with every word that he utters he smiles, as is his custom, then his face closes up again – never, he says, because I only think about today, for me there is no tomorrow, for me there is no future, because every day is the last day, and every day is full and complete, and I could die on any given day, I am ready for it, and then the whole thing will come to an end, and by this he means that – he looks up at a guest sitting across from him on the other side of the room – that one whole will come to an end, and in the distance another shall begin, I am waiting for death, he says with an unvarying smile, I am waiting he says, and death is always close to me, and I shall lose nothing if I die, because for me only the present means everything, this day, this hour, this moment - this moment in which I am dying.

Our novel then moves to Pietro di Vannucci (Il Perugino) and his apprentices, we learn of his struggle to paint anymore. We have the Alhambra in Spain, our journey explains that we don’t know its real name, who built it, when it was built, its main function, but we do know its beauty. Another chapter and another artist who creates sculptures out of earth, by digging in hidden places away from prying eyes. Our protagonist then becomes the guard of the Venus de Milo, there was the Venus de Milo and beyond that there was nothing else at all.

We then have a lecturer giving his thoughts on the analysis of music’s essence, it shatters people’s hearts – this lecture is to a handful of elderly people, given by an ageing architect who has never had a building constructed. Then we have landscape artist Oswald Kienzl standing in line to buy a train ticket, frustrated at the lack of pace in the queue as he recalls his mourning. Back to Japan and a Shinto tree sacrifice ceremony that takes place every twenty years as part the rebuilding of the Ise Shrine, we’re here for edition seventy-one, this section highlighting the clash of European and Japanese cultures.

Onto Se’ami who has been exiled to the island of Sadogashima, he is creating a mask, o-beshimi rain-making mask for use in bagaku. Then we hear of tomb desecrations (known as “excavations”) of the earth below the Shang dynasty in 1600-1100BC.

What a deep exploration of humanity, covering thousands upon thousands of years of human history, the art and the beauty, ceremonies and beliefs contained in each era. As we know these characters are all real and as I read through each section I was enticed to research these characters further, view the artworks on line, understand the struggles through further reading. This is a huge puzzle of a novel, seeking the ultimate answers:

he looks at me, moved, he looks at my dance, but he sees me as well, as I relate to him with earthly movements that there is a Heaven, that high above the clouds there is a Light that then scatters into a thousand colors, that there is, if he casts his gaze up high and becomes deeply immersed in his soul, a boundless space in which there is nothing, but nothing at all, not even a tiny little movement like this one here, which now must slowly come to an end:

All of the puzzles are intertwined, the immortal beauty of Vashti is aligned with the immortal gaze of Buddha, which replicates a crucified Christ wanting to open his eyes......

a dark obscurity lay in these eyes, and it seemed unbearable that this dark obscurity was emanating such an endless sadness, and not the sadness of one who suffers but of one who has suffered – but not even that; he got up, and then he leaned back in the chair; it is not a question here of suffering but only of sorrow, a sorrow impossible to grasp in its entirety, and entirely incomprehensible to him, an immeasurable sorrow, he looked into Christ’s eyes and he saw nothing else there, just this pure sorrow, as if it were a sorrow without cause, he froze at the thought of it, SORROW, JUST LIKE THAT, FOR EVERYTHING, for creation, for existence, for beings, for time, for suffering and for passion, for birth and destruction

I could write endless passages here about the meaning of existence and how Krasznahorkai has moved beyond the simple apocalyptic message and into the world of beauty, the essence of non-existence and the importance of the present moment. An amazing work, which requires savouring, a slow read, allow yourself to be immersed in the world of nothing:

the earth with the water, the water with the sky, and into the earth and the water and the sky, into this indescribable Cosmos is woven our fragile existence as well, but merely for just one moment that cannot be traced, then, already, it is no more, it disappears for all eternity, irrevocably...nothing else remains, only and exclusively the landscape;

The African Shore - Rodrigo Rey Rosa (translated by Jeffrey Gray) - Best Translated Book Award 2014

The African Shore came in for special mention at the Best Translated Book Award in 2014 with the judges noting:

We found Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s short novel The African Shore, masterfully translated by Jeffrey Gray, to be almost the perfect counterpoint to Seiobo There Below. In its sonnet-like perfection, even a single out-of-place word would have marred this novel’s hypnotizing effect, so due praise must be given to Rey Rosa and Gray for presenting us with this seamless, engrossing story. We also admired the strange logic by which Rey Rosa’s book functions, telling two parallel narratives that are connected by that strange symbolic creature, the owl. The African Shore felt very much to us like a story that only Rey Rosa could have told, a small, perfectly cut jewel that we can stare into endlessly. It is emblematic of the very rich exchange between Rey Rosa’s native Guatemala and the Morocco in which he lived for a decade, and its minimalist aesthetic points us toward an interesting new direction for Latin American literature to follow in the new century.

American composer, translator and writer Paul Bowles translated a number of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s works into English as well as having his works translated by Rey Rosa. As a resident of Tangier for over fifty years, the setting of this novel in Morocco is a significant homage to his mentor. Paul Bowles himself recalled his first meeting of Rey Rosa in 1980 at a “creative writing” workshop at the American School of Tangier.

The youngest of the class was a Guatemalan, who wrote in Spanish. He had a fertile imagination, and used it to invent situations which were generally sinister. His texts were very short, often mere scenes or prose-poems of atmosphere, rather than tales, but all of them showed a power of invention capable of creating truly original situations.

“The African Shore” is one of those “truly original situations”, with short, sharp sections (“prose-poems”), we have a tale of a shepherd and an unnamed Columbian tourist, linked together through the fate of an owl. A great example of the short scene in use is where the shepherd invites a small boy into his tent:

When the boy stepped within reach, Hamsa grabbed one of his arms and pulled him toward him. With his free hand he lifted up his gandura.

A very similar scene takes place in the other novel on the Best Translated Book Award shortlist, set in Morocco, “Horses of God”, however that description is more detailed, and explicit. Both have the same outcome, Rodrigo Rey Rosa  actually saying more by saying less. Here is a small snippet of Mahi Binebine's description:

Then it was Fuad's turn to straddle the sleeping boy. He did so delicately, nuzzling and stroking his mount as if they were setting off on a long journey. Nabil was unconscious, laid out in the middle of the room like a corpse. Fuad sat astride him, whispering unintelligible words in his ear. A squawk like a bird’s, then a yelp, like someone being stabbed. And on to the next..

Our shepherd looks after his flock perilously close to the cliffs, so close in fact that our opening has him rescuing one of the flock from the cliff face. His closeness to the shore, leads him to dream of the riches he could make (from his uncle) by assisting with people smuggling from Africa to Europe.

Our unnamed Columbian (he is named once very late in the story) has lost his passport, moves from his hotel, meets a French archaeologist (who becomes a minor character) and isn’t quite as clean as what the surface may show...or is he???

He didn’t like to lie but sometimes the truth about himself seemed so unacceptable that he let himself, always thinking he’d change things later so the fiction would match the reality. He could have been single, though in the eyes of the law he was married – since he had lived several years with his girlfriend – just as he could have been something other than an ordinary tourist with a mislaid passport. He looked in the mirror. As women were always saying, men were dogs. Smiling uncomfortably, he turned and shut the light off.

Our two protagonists here have the standard human frailties, the concerns with existence, the continual journey to somewhere better...The young shepherd thinking about the powers of being able to see at night, wants to use the creature’s eyes as an amulet or as a spell, our Columbian simply admires its beauty. The owl’s journey becomes metaphor for the journey of our two characters. It is trapped, it is “broken” (injured), it is mended, it escapes. Just like our misplaced Columbian and French characters living temporarily at the gateway to Europe.

We have faxes from our Columbian character’s girlfriend, slowly becoming more frantic given the lack of response, the range of minor characters become shadier as the work progresses (or do they? Is it just our imagination as to what they are up to?), the romance between the Columbian and the archaeologist is lightly sketched, actually giving it more substance and the life of the shepherd is simple, just as the words used to describe it.

This is a quick but deeply thoughtful read, weighing in at only 136 pages, however the content reads as a much longer work. The antithesis of another Spanish work on the Best Translated Book Award list, Antonio Munoz Molina’s “In The Night Of Time”.  This is one of my favourites of the list to date, a melancholy muse that says a lot through not saying a lot at all.

Red Grass - Boris Vian - Translated by Paul Knobloch - Best Translated Book Award 2014

Forget the USA vs United Kingdom rivalry, or even the debate about which award is “better”, in my mind both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Best Translated Book Award highlight the benefits of translated fiction and that alone has to be a good thing.

One distinct difference in the two awards is that the Best Translated Book Award allows entries for deceased writers (or more explicitly the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize states that the author must be living at the time of entry) . Therefore the USA Award has introduced me to a number of works which would be ineligible for the UK Award (assuming they have been published in both countries and are eligible for the other criteria of course). This year alone I have read four works (“Red Grass”, “Commentary (A Tale)”, “The Forbidden Kingdom” and “Through The Night”) by deceased writers.

Besides bringing some of these more celebrated works to reader’s attention I’m not 100% convinced that works from the 1930’s or 1940’s is really an area of reading that I’d like to continue to explore. As the majority of my blog posts will show, the majority of works I read and review are contemporary in nature and to suddenly jump to an immediate pre/post World War II era of literature is exposing me to a complete genre of which I know little. In other words I apologise for my ignorance if some of these reviews are a little shallow.

“Red Grass” was written in 1948-1949 when Boris Vian was 28 years of age, so young but his fifth novel published!!!  Apparently he was able to finish works in a “matter of weeks”, however this one apparently took sometime longer to write.

I’m not sure how to describe this work, experimental fiction? Science fiction? We have a talking dog, that has been taught how to meow. The back cover says Boris Vian “is a cult hero among discriminating cyberpunkers”, is that true? Or is this yet another LSD induced pile of rubbish?

The four others engaged in typical dinner table banter – pass the bread, I need a knife, lend me your quill, where are the marbles, my candle’s gone out, who won at Waterloo, honni soit qui mak y pense, the cows will be hemmed in by the meter – all amounting to few rods, for Saphir was in love with Folavril, Lil with Wolf, and vice-versa to ensure narrative symmetry.  And Lil resembled Folavril because the two of them both had long, blond hair, kissable lips, and fine figures. Folavril was a bit taller on her perfect legs, but Lil had prettier shoulders, and what’s more, Wolf had married her. Without his rubber suit, Saphir was all the more smitten. This was the first phase; he was drinking the purest wine. Life was empty, and not sad. It was simply on hold. For Wolf. For Saphir, overflowing and beyond description. Same for Lil. Folavril did not think. She simply lived and was sweet, with those pinched-up doe-panther eyes of hers.

Maybe I’m the one who has lost the plot, because at some stage Saphir becomes Lazuli (without explanation) or maybe they’re two different characters in love with Folavril. I knew those mushrooms I ate back in the 1980’s would do me no good!!

Wolf decided to freshen up a bit before returning to the room where they were dancing and singing. He washed his hands, let his moustache grow, saw that it didn’t suit him, and then shaved it with one hand while knotting his tie with the other, trying to give it more volume so as to remain in step with the latest fashion trends. Then he risked insulting the hallway as he moved backwards through the corridor, knocking over the circuit breaker that controlled the temperature during the long winter nights. This caused the lighting to be replaced by extra-soft x-ray emissions, blunted for safety, which projected enlarged images of the dancers’ hearts onto the luminescent walls, the rhythm of the beats indicating their fondness for their respective partners.

I suppose I should explain what the plot of this novel is about. Wolf, an engineer, invents (and uses) a time machine to travel backwards and erase his memories. To forget he has to visit six people in a fixed chronological order, to discuss his memories:

1)      Family relations

2)      Grade school and subsequent studies

3)      Initial experiences in religious matters

4)      Puberty, adolescent sex life, eventual marriage

5)      Activity as an individual cell in a larger social body

6)      Metaphysical anxieties born of more intimate contact with the world

The story follows Wolf on these journeys, in his time machine, his discussions on the above subjects and his subsequent travel back to the current day. Each time his loss of memory changing something in the present time. We have made up words attached to sports, “bloodsport” for example, being a game where you blow needles into living targets who are strapped to walls, you choose your style of target, young, old, male female.

Lil was seated at her dressing table in a simple bathrobe, busy with her nails. For three minutes now they had been soaking in a juice of decalcified bindwind, all in order to soften up the cuticle so that the lunula looked exactly like a quarter-moon. She carefully prepared the little cage with its removable floor, the inside of which contained two specialized beetles that were sharpening their mandibles in anticipation of the moment when they would be tasked with the chore of making the skin vanish. Lil put the cage on her thumbnail and pulled the cord. Upon a sated purr, the insects went to work with pathological competitiveness. The first insect transformed the skin into a fine powder, while the second put on the finishing touches, trimming and polishing the rough edges left by its little comrade.

The female characters are quite serene and assured of their futures here, the male ones tormented and lost, is this some sort of tortured autobiography? Lauzuli, for example, every time he goes to make love to his girlfriend, or when in the throes of passion, an apparition appears.  As a result he can’t complete what he set out to do.

This is surely a strange work, one that explores the mystical boundaries of time travel and the consequences of dabbling in events that have already occurred. A post war tale of a wonderful future where you are served alcoholic pineapple juice, can travel in time, synchronise your love life and more. Personally not a novel I’d normally read and only did so as it was on the Best Translated Book Award longlist.

“You’ve always been able to resist your desires,” she said. “And you always will be. That’s why you’ll die unfulfilled.”

The Forbidden Kingdom - Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (translated by Paul Vincent) - Best Translated Book Award 2014

One of the delights of working your way though translated fiction award lists is you become exposed to a number of small independent publishers. As translated fiction makes up only a small part of the “consumable” market, it is primarily left to the small houses to produce the gems that sparkle on these lists. “The Forbidden Kingdom” is a case in point, produced by Pushkin Press, they tell us that “this book is part of the Pushkin Collection of paperbacks, designed to be as satisfying as possible to hold and enjoy. It is typeset in Monotype Baskerville, based on the transitional English serif typeface designed in the mid-eighteenth century by John Baskerville. It was litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owner printer TJ International in Padstow, Cornwall. The cover, with French flaps, was printed on Conqueror Brilliant White Board. The paper and cover board are both acid-free and approved by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).”

In other words, this is a beautifully presented work, small in size but the presentation itself is a joy to hold and read. Something that e-readers cannot offer.

Onto the novel itself, originally published in Dutch in 1932 over nine seperate instalments, it tells the tale of Portuguese National poet Luis Camoes (1524/5 – 1580) and best remembered for his epic work Os Lusiadas (The Lusiads). Our “hero” Luis is exiled from his homeland of Portugal and we follow his journey to the trading outpost of Macao in the East.

“Why was I surrounded by statues since childhood, graceful and silent, as if that were the attitude one should take to life? Why so many paintings on the wall, so that it seemed to me that they were the windows, giving a view of a world where everything was beautiful and harmonious and near at hand, making it unnecessary to travel dangerous roads! If only you’d brought me up in the woods with an axe and double-edged hunting knife for my toys and the fleeing game as my target, then I’d have become efficient and decisive! As it is, I’ve done nothing but ponder and my deeds were badly aimed shots at a vaguely glimpsed reality.”

Hold on a minute, why not introduce an unrelated story of an unnamed Irish ship radio operator in the 20^th Century? One who is also exiled, but from the ships themselves, as he is losing his sanity, of course he ends up in Macao. Are these seemingly unrelated stories actually related?

Not a woman then! What then? A mind in this state, open to outside influences, becomes and easy target for demons eager to prey on a living being like parasites. But at sea there are no spirits, at least so I firmly believed. That absence, or that belief, saved me for a long time; when I yearned to be freed from my emptiness, I would not have excluded even the most malevolent of them. The sea saved me, it’s true. But I wasn’t grateful to the sea.

Of course we have a novel that jumps across time, one that also jumps across language, with sections written in the first person, others in the third person and as each chapter unfolded I found myself becoming deeply involved with the plot, only to be violently shaken free as a new chapter, place, person or style began.

The “Afterword” by Jane Fenoulhet, from University College London, gave me a little more context and assistance with this work. Jon Jacob Slauerhoff was already established  as a well known poet before his first prose works were published, he began with short story publications in 1930 before this work appeared in 1932 in nine instalments in the literary magazine “Forum” and was immediately published in book form.

Slauerhoff is most frequently described as a Romantic poet because of his themes of loss, longing, doomed love, dreamlike landscapes, and of roaming the seas.

This novel covers all of those themes, with Camoes or our unnamed radio operator battling storms, trips through rugged landscapes in China, loss of homeland or true loves, and numerous dream sequences. In a way it reads like an eighty year old David Mitchell work!!!

This is an interesting observation of potential time travel from the 1930’s, however my lack of knowledge of Camoes or “The Lusiads” was definitely a hindrance in enjoying this work. And as per my usual blog posts I don’t want to give away the plot or premise so revelation of the two characters becoming one, being only one across different times, or being totally separate threads will not be revealed here.

An enjoyable work? Yes. One that I’ll revisit? No. I think I’ll leave the analysis, the debunking of myths, the placement of this work in Slauerhoff’s oeuvre, the connection to other 1930’s works on time travel and Romantic styles, to the academics. I’m sure they’d enjoy it a heap more than me.

Horses of God - Mahi Binebine (translated by Lulu Norman) - Best Translated Book Award 2014

I really like the quote on the “Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize” banner, Anthony Burgess, “Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.” A great line to open my review of Mahi Binebine’s “Horse of God”.

On 16 May 2003 in Casablanca, twelve suicide bombers died, taking the lives of thirty three civilians along with them. Two further bombers were arrested before they could carry out any attacks. To this day this event remains the largest terrorist attack in Morocco’s history. The suicide bombers came from the shanty town of Sidi Moumen a slum in Casablanca housing close to 300,000 people (various figures are quoted throughout the internet but I have used the census figures from 2004). The inhabitants scratching out existences by living off scraps and rubbish from the nearby dumps. Our novel follows Yachine (a self-given nickname) from the afterlife as he reflects on his journey from the slums to becoming a suicide bomber.

As you can imagine, this novel tells no easy tales, tackles an extremely controversial subject and creates anti-heroes in marginalised characters. The subject matter alone makes this no easy read, let alone the humanising of bombers as poverty stricken, bored youths who made a choice based on false promises. To say the novel made me feel uneasy is an understatement:

But around there, everyone got used to everything – to the stench of rotting and death, for instance, which became so familiar and clung to our skin. We couldn’t smell it anymore. And if it were suddenly, magically, to vanish, Sidi Moumen would lose its soul. The air would probably seem bland and insipid; dogs and cats would vanish from the scene, as would the hordes of seagulls that besieged the place, preferring its contaminated, sweltering heat to sea air, its shadowy foragers to fishermen of the deep. Even the old people would be bored if there were no more flies to swat away, or mosquitoes to anything. Can you imagine: Sidi Moumen, stripped bare! Without its wild nights at the dump. Without its campfires, where random musicians, their petrol cans transformed into mandolins, unfurl their laments into a hashish-scented sky; and those fields of plastic bags that sing in the wind, while teasing half-light turns the rubbish dunes into infinite beaches…

Our gang of friends who transition from kids picking through rubbish dumps to Salafia Jihadia terrorists, also lead lives where extreme violence is common place (people being murdered and buried in the rubbish being a common occurrence – nobody misses them anyway).  However, besides a life of no hope, the kids all play a weekly game of football (soccer) where the various slums passionately become their footballing heroes (hence the nickname Yachine – considered the greatest goalkeeper of all time, the “Black Spider” or “Black Panther” his nicknames). This is the one and only joy in their lives, besides their friendships.

In the beginning was the dump, teeming with its colony of rascals. The cult of soccer; the incessant fighting; the shoplifting and frantic getaways; the ups and downs of trying to survive; hashish, glue, and the strange places they took you; the black market and the small-time jobs; the repeated beatings; the sudden attempts at escape and their ransoms of rape and abuse…

As if the journey from a slum inhabitant to a suicide bomber isn’t controversial enough for you, the violence, including sexual, is graphically detailed, the drug use (hashish, glue sniffing) a common place occurrence, all the more that becomes piled on and it makes you begin to understand their attraction to religion as a means of escape, training in martial arts, a regimented and meaningful day, mentors, teachers who listen and at last some guidance and purpose.

He’d given us back our pride with simple words, winged words that carried us as far as our imaginations could go. No longer were we parasites, the dregs of humanity, less than nothing. We were clean and deserving and our aspirations resonated with healthy minds. We were listened to, guided. Logic had taken the place of beating. We had opened the door to God and He had entered into us. No more chasing around frantically, expending pointless energy, no more insults and stupid brawling. No more living like cockroaches on the excrement of heretics. Gone, the fatalism injected in our veins by our uneducated parents. We learned to stand shoulder to shoulder, to flatly refuse the worm’s life to which we’d been condemned in perpetuity. We knew that rights weren’t given, they had to be seized. And we were ready for any sacrifice.

As Anthony Burgess’ quote tells us, through translation I have managed to come across a work, which forces you to look at these terrorists as human. Surely a novel that will force you to examine your own beliefs, prejudices, ideas of victims and more – definitely not a comfortable read, but, I can assure you, an important work.

One flaw that did come to mind was the fact that our narrator uses such in depth language, occasionally a word that seems out of place, and given he “wasn’t taught the words to convey the beauty of people or things” it did occur to me how could he now? All knowledgeable after death?

The original title of this novel was “The Stars of Sidi Moumen” and I must admit this resonated with me a whole lot more than “Horses of God” – the phrase often used by Muslims when calling for a jihad (“Fly, horses of God, and to you the doors of paradise shall open!”) Personally the importance of their weekly soccer matches and the bond that their sport brought is to me a better title. And the cover? Young boys playing soccer, I get it, a decent soccer ball and all clothed and wearing decent footwear? That I don’t get.

Through The Night - Stig Saeterbakken (translated by Sean Kinsella) - Best Translated Book Award 2014

As regular visitors to this blog would know, I do delve into Nordic Literature every so often and have spent quite a few hours with Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard and his “struggles”, so when Stig Saeterbakken’s “Through The Night” made the 2014 Best Translated Book Award Longlist I was straight online to purchase a copy.

Stig Saeterbakken took his own life in 2012 and this novel deals with suicide, through the eyes of Karl Meyer, a dentist, who is struggling to come to terms with his teenage son’s suicide. The book opens with a powerful set of vignettes, with Karl attempting to deal with his grief, make sense of his wife’s grief (who has just put an axe through the television) and wondering how he can reconnect with his daughter.

Our novel then tracks back, through a long series of short memories, recalling the events that Karl shared with his son Ole-Jacob, and all the actions that may have led to this tragic suicide.

The thought of losing her left me cold and made me feel faint. I didn’t understand why it had to be this way, why one life was so completely destructive in relation to the other. I wanted to live together with Eva, and I wanted to drown together with Mona. So why couldn’t it be done? Was it just down to all the ideas we’d pledged allegiance to, keeping these states mutually exclusive? But what were our real thoughts, aside from what we’d been instructed to think? Why should you have to stop living just because you were drowning?

As a novel this appears to be broken into two distinct sections – the lead up to Ole-Jacob’s death and the events that may have pushed him to take his own life; and then the post death grieving and attempts at reconciling with oneself that final act.

The first section reminded me (slightly) of Karl Ove Knausgaard, in that the everyday was explored in some detail (nowhere near the minute detail we see in “My Struggle”) as Karl recalls his passions, his neglect, his attempts at “fatherhood”, a complex pile of short vignettes that make up this man’s past.

I thought about my father. What would he have made of it all? And what about him, when he was alive? Did he ever want more than he had, more than he allowed himself to ask for? Was he really, as his manner suggested, so reconciled with everything that was his? So uninterested in everything that was not? Or was it simply convention, his generation’s penchant for reserve, the way they would confuse taciturnity with masculinity, that had prevented him from expressing the desire for anything more?

The second section, where Karl leaves his family for a second time, to reconcile with himself the horrors of his son’s death, takes us to a shady world of dream like sequences, changes of character where Karl no longer acts as he would have in the earlier section, visits to horror movies and apocalyptic plays and finally to a house of horror where anybody can confront all of their fears.

Yet I had a feeling of security which rendered me unafraid, now that I was finally standing there. All the scares, they were only there as a barrier, an ordeal you had to endure, an obstacle you had to overcome, in order to get to what really lay in store for you, and which was, as the dream at the Hotel Lucia had convinced me, the fulfilment of all desires, all dreams, all needs. Those who had gone mad from being in the house, they were the only ones who’d given up in the face of all its ordeals. While those who’d come out happy, they were the ones who’d endured them, and defeated them, and in the end had been rewarded, satisfied down to the very depths of their innermost desires.

A novel that is a meditation on death, that takes us through the journey of attempting to make sense of suicide, of a father grieving and looking at ways of healing, this book is does not cover easy subject matter. Very much like Knausgaard’s “My Struggle”’s this is a deeply personal book of a writer struggling with his own existence.

I put my hands in my lap and sat staring, as if it were important not to take my eyes off them, even for a moment. My feet were freezing. I thought about the muddy ground we’d been standing in and imagined I could hear a sucking every time I moved my toes. Some speeches were made. But nothing that was said had anything to do with my son, none of the character sketches were accurate, it was like they were talking about someone else, or like they weren’t talking about anyone in particular, but merely singling out the characteristics of an average eighteen year old, keeping themselves to the fringes of what anyone would assume about boys of that age, without daring to venture in past the periphery, where he was really to be found. Everyone spoke in a subdued voice; some whispered. The whole gathering proceeded in that same drone, a monotonous, lifeless stream of words around the tables, as if volume was a luxury it would be tactless to indulge in.

Personally I found the earlier section more gripping as the character of Karl is slowly revealed and as we learn his fears, misgivings and motivations. Through simple, short sections that portray a man struggling with his own existence we learn all about his fears. The second section, where he confronts such, to me was a little metaphysical and introducing characters such as a man who is on a well-balanced alcohol only diet, although intriguing seemed a little broad for the subject matter at hand. The inclusion of photos of a simple house that you could probably find anywhere in Croatia was a bit strange and I’m not 100% convinced of the ending. The translation was probably a little shabby too, there were a couple of sentences that I read over a number of times before giving up because they simply didn’t make sense – this could be the writer not the translation, however I’ll go with the translator (apologies if it’s not their work!)

Overall another great book from an interesting list of translated works, one that approaches the dark, often ignored, subject of suicide as the main theme. Such a pity our author didn’t personally confront the subject matter he so expertly wrote upon – or maybe he did!

Commentary (A Tale) - Marcelle Sauvageot (translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley & Anna Moschovakis) - Best Translated Book Award 2014

In my review of the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlisted “The Mussel Feast”, back in early April, why did it take twenty-three years for a work being celebrated in its native language before the English speaking and reading world discovers it? Well if that sounds outrageous, this work, was originally published back in 1933 and has undergone NINE republications in France. English readers get to see it for the first time in 2014!! Add to that the fact that this edition from Ugly Duckling Presse had a print run of 1,250, therefore the exposure is not that high. I’m sure they are eternally grateful for the Best Translated Book Award Longlist nomination, a few more copies moved!!

Our writer, Marcelle Sauvageot died from tuberculosis aged in her early thirties. This “tale” is a monologue, taking in her journey to a sanatorium to recover from her illness:

And when I am cured, you’ll see how everything will be fine. I like speaking familiarity to you now that you’re no longer here. I’m not accustomed to it, it feels forbidden to me: it’s marvellous. DO you think one day I will really be able to speak to you this way? When I am cured, you will no longer find me bad-tempered. I am sick. You told me the sick force themselves to be sweeter to those around them: and you cited some beautiful examples for me. I do not love you when you are delivering sermons; you make me want to yawn, and if you reproach me, it means you love me less; you’re comparing me to others. The sick are sweet, but what I am is exhausted; carrying on and saying “thank you” to those who do not understand is wearing away all my strength.

The monologue then moves to her reading a letter from her younger lover who informs her that he is now married and that he would like to retain their relationship, now as “friendship”.

Tomorrow I will write to you and no longer know how to address you in this familiar way, I will write to you and will not know how to tell you everything I say to you in my heart. You who have remained there, among the living; can you understand that I am a prisoner? I no longer know how to speak. I am here, stupefied, and like a cold and certain truth I feel that, when one is here, nothing is possible anymore: you cannot keep loving me.

Put simply, this small work is a hidden masterpiece (from the English speaking world that is). A deeply intimate work, we delve inside Sauvageot’s emotions, her questioning of why “Baby’s” (her lover is never named) love for her has failed, and she’s pouring this all out onto the page on her death bed…

This corner of myself judged you, measured you; and in judging and measuring you I saw you weaknesses, your insufficiencies; where is the harm in my staying, in my accepting these insufficiencies, in my loving them? O, Man! You always want to be admired. You do not judge, you do not measure the woman you love. You are there, you take her; you take your happiness, she seems not to belong to herself anymore, to have lost all sense of anything: you are happy. To you she cried: I love you, and you are satisfied. You are not brutal; you are gentle, you talk to her, you worry about her; you comfort her with tender words; you cradle her in your arms. But you do not judge her, since you are asking her to be happy through you and to tell you that she is happy through you. But if you notice two eyes watching you, then smiling, you revolt. You feel that you have been “seen” and you don’t want to be seen: you want only “to be.” Nervously, you ask: “What are you thinking?”

A stunning example of feminist literature, the ruminations of a woman’s emotions and thinking, and a consistent thread “why always the patriarchal definitions of love?”

People say to a woman: “The man you were made for,” and to a man: “The woman who was made for you.” Can they envision: “The woman you were made for”? A man is: everything seems to have been made available to him…even somewhere in the world, a woman who suits him, whose union with him existed before her birth. These words – “you were made for” – imply an obedient and submissive adaptation on which a woman’s happiness will depend. Strange thing: the woman is made for the man and it is she who will be made happy. Can the man not be made happy, or does his happiness reside in feeling the consenting pliability of the one who is made for him? Is than man caressing a beautiful Siamese cat hoping to find out what the animal’s light eyes are saying? Or does he think that the caress itself is the only thing that can cause the animal to be moved?

An extremely short work, about 76 small pages, but very deep and amazingly moving.  The only dislike I had for the publication was the introduction by Jennifer Moxley, a condescending trite rambling that gave away the whole feel of the work, was too highbrow and too clever by half. I suggest you skip it, unless you’re a student of hers, and want bonus marks!!!

We should be celebrating that this is finally available in English and I thank the judges of the Best Translated Book Award for including it on the 2014 long list as it brought the work to my attention. I can’t recommend this work highly enough, even if you simply discover that after 80 years, when it comes to love, little (if anything) has changed. We are still living in the patriarchal world. A quick warning though, I suggest you get a copy of this quickly as there are only 1,249 of the print run floating out there somewhere as my own copy is going nowhere.

In The Night Of Time - Antonio Munoz Molina (translated by Edith Grossman) - Best Translated Book Award 2014

Interestingly enough, on the weekend, I read an article which quoted Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s long term collaborator and English translator Edith Grossman. “Translating means expressing an idea or concept in a way that’s entirely different from the original, since each language is a different system. And so, in fact, when I translate a book written in Spanish, I’m actually writing another book in English.” (To see the full interview go to The Washington Post here)

Edith Grossman is the translator of Antonio Munoz Molina’s “In The Night Of Time” and it’s not often that you have the cover spruiking the translator in similar sized font to the author. For this work she would have needed the patience of a saint, this is one serious tome of a novel, besides running to 641 pages it is large in shape, the paragraphs run for pages on end and therefore each page is wall to wall text. So if you’re not into a long slow challenge then this is not a novel for you.

Our story starts with an unknown narrator observing Ignacio Abel at Pennsylvania Station in 1936. He is about to board a train to take him to upstate New York where he has been asked to design a new library. The train journey begins and Juan Ignacio drifts back to Spain and the reasons behind his move here. This is the story of the Spanish Civil War:

Professor Rossman no longer had to wait for anything. He’d been buried with several dozen other corpses and hurriedly covered in lime in a common grave in Madrid, infected without reason or fault by the great medieval plague of Spanish death, spread indiscriminately by the most modern and most primitive means alike, everything from Mauser rifles, machine guns, and incendiary bombs to crude ancestral weapons: pocketknives, harquebuses, hunting shotguns, cattle prods, even animal jawbones if necessary, death that descended with the roar of airplane engines and the neighing of mules, with scapulars and crosses and red flags, with rosary prayers and the shouting of anthems on the radio.

This slow train journey takes over 500 pages of the novel and the flashbacks aren’t primarily about the Civil War, it is a crescendo in the novel becoming increasingly prominent and all consuming. In the early sections we learn about Ignacio Abel’s training to become an architect, from a working class family, his success, marriage, fatherhood and then his falling in love with an American tourist Judith. The early sections being all consuming with his love affair, with the Civil War as merely a backdrop, a Spain rotten to the core:

But he wouldn’t have been able to explain to his wife that the antagonism he felt toward her family was due not to ideological but to esthetic differences, the same silent antagonism he felt towards the inexhaustible Spanish ugliness of so many common place things, a kind of national depravity that offended his sense of beauty more deeply than his convictions regarding justice: the stuffed heads of bulls over bars in taverns; the paprika red and saffron-substitute yellow of bullfight posters; folding chairs and carved desks that imitated the Spanish Renaissance; dolls in flamenco dresses, a curl on their forehead, which closed their eyes when leaned back and opened them as if resuscitated when they were upright again; rings with cubic stones; gold teeth in the brutal mouths of tycoons; the newspaper obituaries of dead children – he rose to heaven, he joined the angels – and their tragic white coffins; baroque moldings; excrescences carved in granite on the vulgar facades of banks; coat and hat racks made with the horns and hooves of deer or mountain goats; coats of arms for common last names made of glazed ceramic from Talavera; funeral announcements in the ABC or El Debate; photographs of King Alfonso XIII hunting, just a few days before he left the country, indifferent or blind to what was happening around him, leaning on his rifle beside the head of a dead deer, or erect and jovial next to a sacrifice of partridges or pheasants or hares, surrounded by gentlemen in hunting outfits and gaiters and servants in poor men’s berets and espadrilles and smiles diminished by toothless mouths.

The quotes I have chosen here show the undercurrent of Antonio Munoz Molina’s theme, a Spain in decay, a place where all reason has disappeared, but by doing so I’ve left out the substantial part of the plot. This is also a romance, a love story, a revelation as our protagonist slowly learns about himself, slowly evolves into a passionate man, as a n architect he’s slowly designing a new future for himself, one that is based on solid and rational foundations, a future that needs to be certain, that will withstand the test of time.

Words are nothing, the delirium of desires and phantasmagoria whirling in vain inside the hard, impenetrable concavity of the skull; only physical contact counts, the touch of another hand, the warmth of a body, the mysterious beat of a pulse. How long has it been since someone touched him, a figure folding in on himself on the train seat, as hard and mineral-like as a thick, closed seashell.

To be honest I think this book needed some severe editing, some of the encounters with his lover seemed to repeat endlessly similar thoughts and even at time replicated the same scenes but from a different viewpoint. A two hour train journey that took me probably ten times as long to complete:

…physically he’s reached his destination, but his body holds the tension of the journey, the instinct to distrust, to keep vigilant.

That is exactly how I felt once I read that quote with over 100 pages still to go, c’mon Antonio Munoz Molina, I’ve reached my destination, I’m tired, give it up!

Another real distraction for me was the novel commencing in the first person narrative style with somebody observing Ignacio Abel, it quickly slipped to the third person, and took a further 380 odd pages before the “I’ Returned – very distracting. The positive is that the length gives each of the main players here a real depth of character and as they are slowly revealed to us, the horrors of the Civil War take up only a sentence here or there, as we move towards the end and we have compassion for our characters the War becomes more of a central theme. And always niggling at the edges is a secret, somebody who knocks on his door at night and asks for help, who was it, what did Ignacio Abel do? You need to read on to find out.

I also must admit there was one time where I nearly threw the book away in disgust, 409 pages in Ignacio Abel’s lover Judith is described as “she wasn’t afraid of anything” this is after a full 30 pages of description earlier in the novel about her fear when being followed in the lower class areas of Madrid and needing rescue by her married lover.

A worthwhile read, too long, a worthy inclusion on the Best Translated Book Award longlist, personally I’m happy it didn’t make the shortlist. 

Blinding - Mircea Cartarescu (translated by Sean Cotter) - Best Translated Book Award 2014

“There was nothing to understand, yet everything cried out to be understood...” (P109)

Welcome to the world of Mircea Cartarescu’s brain, there’s plenty in there and it just cries out to be understood, but I must admit there was a whole heap of grey matter that I just didn’t grip.

“Blinding (The Left Wing)” is the first part of a Cartarescu triptych (let’s call it that and not a trilogy as it forms part of a greater picture, the left wing being his mother, the body himself and the right wing his father from what I understand) and this triptych is a massive, intricate butterfly. The references to butterflies are too frequent to mention them all, from the birthmark on Maria’s (his mother’s) hip, an ivory engraved ring made from a mammoth’s tusk, a monstrous frozen butterfly under the surface of the Danube (which is consumed and the wings used for clothing), butterflies that attach themselves to Russian soldiers in a mausoleum and then lay an egg in his brain or even one that mates with a stranded elevator operator after the building is bombed. The metamorphosis is a constant thread along with triangles (structurally, physically, spiritually) and the colour yellow.

To say this is a complex work is an understatement, delving into a tortured mind would always be so, are we talking dreams here, or the everyday machinations of our narrator’s mind?

I felt in my sleep how, in this geyser of light, my own cranium became transparent, how the wrinkled hemispheres of my brain, wrapped in their skin, looked like the meat of walnuts yet unformed. The neurons under the pia mater, like spores bedded under asphalt, swelled here and there, growing hundreds of church spires under the sky of my skull, each one with a bell tolling for a funeral, until the pearly skin broke in hundreds of places and the neuron bells opened like wonders, like sea urchins on the peduncles, rocking and undulating in the solar wind of my Tataie’s halo. I then descended into a delirious Scythia.

How to describe this work? There are chilling stories of people who lose thier shadows,  eight pages of the divine simply exploring the magic of how we can move a single finger and heavy rhetoric:

Maybe, in the heart of this book, there is nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling...

Underneath all of this madness in Cartaresu’s hemispheres is the city of Bucharest meticulously recreated, familiar statues explored in detail and their meanings, allegories for Science, Art, Agriculture and Trade simply part of the narrative. As you wallow inside Cartarescu’s brain you uncover a city, a country, that is part of, is actually passed, a great war. Our writer imagines he can control the city, just like the control he uses to move his finger.

When you are living inside the narrator’s “pia mater” you come across some seriously surreal stuff:

Cripples, dwarfs, cachexics, coxalgics, myelomeningoceliacs, the monstrously obese, cyclopedes, those with cleft lips, eleven fingers and eleven toes, bruised skin from a cardiac deformity, lepers, those scarred by anthrax, by scrofula, by vitiligo...the curved line of giant statues embraced the room with a ring of mutilations, and the funeral train advanced across its endless surface, like a parade of mites.

Special mention here has to go to translator Sean Cotter, who is either a genius by bringing to the English language such deeply obscure words, or he’s just as offbeat as Cartarescu in his thinking. This would not have been an easy work to translate, as you can probably gather by the few simple quotes I have included here, the novel runs to 464 pages!!!

I’m yet to touch on the broader subject of this amazing work, Cartarescu’s mother, because even though we are passengers hitching a ride through our writer’s dark mental caverns this is actually the story of his mother, how she moved to Bucharest, how she met his father, her experiences of war, of meeting a  jazz drummer from New Orleans who has a penchant for masochism,  her sexual awakening and her darkest dreams. A twisted homage to a parent?

I sat on the balcony in my pajamas for half an hour, watching the clouds, whiter than the very white sky, outlined in light, and when I went back into the kitchen, I felt I was entering a sinister cave. In the deep shadow, Mamma seemed like a gypsy woman forgotten on a chair beside the stove, all dark and sweaty, except for the globes of her eyes, which caught the blinding folds of the summer sky. Wasps in yellow plating crawled everywhere. They’d made a nest in the vent and had come through its metal grill. There were wasps as big as my fingers on my mother’s body, as though she were some kind of odd animal trainer. They pulled themselves along with their powerful buccal mechanisms, through her fine, thin, chestnut hair that was untouched by gray, spinning their wings like fans. I told her I was going for a walk. I got dressed and went into the blinding heat outside.

This is not a novel for those who would like to lay poolside and discover whodunit, it is a slow contemplative piece, an amazingly complex construction and a true example of how language can be art. Another classic example of how writers in translation are pushing the boundaries of the written word, pushing their reader’s boundaries to a higher plane:

It was a place to attempt (as I’ve done continuously for the last three months) to go back to where no one has, to remember what no one remembers, to understand what no person can understand: who I am, what I am.