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Rivers of the Unspoilt World
Described as one of the UK's finest short story writers, Constantine intricately interweaves fictional characters and events with the real to create new ways of seeing and connecting our past, present and possible futures.
With extraordinary patience and precision, these stories centre on moments, conversations, meetings that feel like small details picked out from a larger tapestry.
From the academic in Paris, researching the atrocities of the fall of 1871 Paris Commune, to the young biographer who tries to befriend the ailing poet Hölderlin, the characters in this collection are united by an urge for connection, a desire to better know themselves - and the world around them - to counteract a loss of hope and belonging.
With extraordinary patience and precision, these stories centre on moments, conversations, meetings that feel like small details picked out from a larger tapestry.
From the academic in Paris, researching the atrocities of the fall of 1871 Paris Commune, to the young biographer who tries to befriend the ailing poet Hölderlin, the characters in this collection are united by an urge for connection, a desire to better know themselves - and the world around them - to counteract a loss of hope and belonging.
- GenresShort Stories
214 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2022
About the author
David Constantine
103 books32 followersBorn in 1944, David Constantine worked for thirty years as a university teacher of German language and literature. He has published several volumes of poetry, most recently, Nine Fathom Deep (2009). He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. In 2003 his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Lighter Than Air won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation of Goethe's Faust, Part I was published by Penguin in 2005; Part II in April 2009. He is also author of one novel, Davies, and Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. His four short story collections are Back at the Spike, the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), and The Shieling (Comma, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Constantine's story 'Tea at the Midland' won the BBC National Short Story Award 2010, and won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for the collection (Comma Press, 2012). He lives in Oxford where, for ten years, he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen (until 2011). David's short story 'In Another Country' has been adapted into 45 Years - a major Film4-funded feature film, directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Tom Courtenay & Charlotte Rampling. This film won two silver bear awards at the Berlinale International Film festival in February 2015. David is also the author of the forthcoming novel, released by Comma Press, The Life-Writer.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 15, 2022
Comma Press heralds David Constintine as one of the UK's finest short story writers. While that may set up expectations that are hard to meet, this collection of three works is an intriguing mix of approaches. Only the third - The Rivers of the Unspoilt World, from which the collection is named - really captured my interest. The third entry is by itself a 100-page novella, which probably could have been published on its own. Although the subject was enticingly esoteric, set in the milieu of the German Romantic period, I'm not sure I came away from this any more enlightened than I was going in. The first two stories are shorter, and seem to appeal to readers other than me, so perhaps they are worthwhile. Despite my lackluster enjoyment of this collection, I can see the merit of it and hope it finds its way to readers who can better appreciate it.
October 4, 2022
4.5 stars
I really unexpectedly loved these three novellas about time and history. There is something a bit unfashionable about them in today’s climate: they are a little rambling, they concern old dead people we’ve never heard of, quote poetry on a whim, and are full of exquisitely tuned prose. But they are unapologetic in their unfashionableness, and they are really quite beautiful.
The first, “Our Glad,” is a reported-speech dialogue between a man and his great aunt. The great aunt is elderly, the man is interested in family history and genealogy and he is picking her brains before she dies, essentially. What I loved was the way form was wedded to function in this story: long paragraphs in which the protagonists interrupt one another, take up the thread of conversation and move with it where they will. And although it is a family history it is broader than that; the man is aware that he is myth-building, but these little forays into his past allow him a closer understanding of the past, of the kinds of people who roamed, rootless, across England at various points in history, of the reality of living in the past, dying young, of the nature of life itself.
The second story is set in Paris, where a Polish academic is provoked into revealing all her deep personal feelings about her subject, the Paris commune. She lives in the past, but an encounter with people fleeing geopolitical forces in the present provides unexpected resonance.
The third, titular story went over my head quite a bit. It concerns the German Romantic poet Hölderlein, who I wasn’t familiar with. He is insane and incarcerated, hallucinating meetings with his lost lover, but a young friend sets out on a journey by foot across the landscape of his youth, to visit the old places and rub up against the vanished world.
Someone suggested that these stories are historical fiction in a way, but they approach it slant. They are set in the past talking about the deeper past, or they use the present to reflect upon the past (rather than the other way round) and generally they avoid forced lessons, except maybe the second story. They are surprising, thoughtful, at times romantic, at times a little sentimental. Unfashionable, as I said. But memorable.
I really unexpectedly loved these three novellas about time and history. There is something a bit unfashionable about them in today’s climate: they are a little rambling, they concern old dead people we’ve never heard of, quote poetry on a whim, and are full of exquisitely tuned prose. But they are unapologetic in their unfashionableness, and they are really quite beautiful.
The first, “Our Glad,” is a reported-speech dialogue between a man and his great aunt. The great aunt is elderly, the man is interested in family history and genealogy and he is picking her brains before she dies, essentially. What I loved was the way form was wedded to function in this story: long paragraphs in which the protagonists interrupt one another, take up the thread of conversation and move with it where they will. And although it is a family history it is broader than that; the man is aware that he is myth-building, but these little forays into his past allow him a closer understanding of the past, of the kinds of people who roamed, rootless, across England at various points in history, of the reality of living in the past, dying young, of the nature of life itself.
The second story is set in Paris, where a Polish academic is provoked into revealing all her deep personal feelings about her subject, the Paris commune. She lives in the past, but an encounter with people fleeing geopolitical forces in the present provides unexpected resonance.
The third, titular story went over my head quite a bit. It concerns the German Romantic poet Hölderlein, who I wasn’t familiar with. He is insane and incarcerated, hallucinating meetings with his lost lover, but a young friend sets out on a journey by foot across the landscape of his youth, to visit the old places and rub up against the vanished world.
Someone suggested that these stories are historical fiction in a way, but they approach it slant. They are set in the past talking about the deeper past, or they use the present to reflect upon the past (rather than the other way round) and generally they avoid forced lessons, except maybe the second story. They are surprising, thoughtful, at times romantic, at times a little sentimental. Unfashionable, as I said. But memorable.
February 5, 2023
Wenn aus der Ferne, da wir geschieden sind,
Ich dir noch kennbar bin, die Vergangenheit,
O du Teilhaber meiner Leiden!
Einiges Gute bezeichnen dir kann,
So sage, wie erwartet die Freundin dich?
In jenen Gärten, da nach entsetzlicher
Und dunkler Zeit wir uns gefunden?
Hier an den Strömen der heiligen Urwelt.
The opening verses of Wenn aus der Ferne by Friedrich Hölderlin
Severed and at a distance now and in
The past if I were able still to show you
Something good and you with a sorrow
Equalling mine should you still know my face
Then say how might she expect to find you now,
Your friend: in the gardens where we met again
After the terror and the dark or
Here by the rivers of the unspoilt world?
from David Constantine's translaton in Selected Poems
Constantine goes on to explain the history of the poem in an afterword:
‘Severed and at a distance now…’ [Wenn aus der Ferne …; 2, 262]:
Probably written after 1806, first published 1921. The poem, unfinished, is associated with very late expansions of the novel Hyperion and may be thought of as being spoken by Diotima, though, of course, both she, the heroine of the novel, and her counterpart in real life, Susette Gontard, had died.
David Constantine's Rivers of the Unspoilt World, published by Comma Press (a not-for-profit publisher and development agency specialising in short fiction from the UK and beyond) is a collection of three novellas, each quite distinct, but each with a lyrical and innovative take on historic fiction.
The title story (104pp), is the last in the collection. The title is taken, as per above, from Constantine's translation of Hölderlin's Wenn aus der Ferne, and passages of his translation of this and other poems, as well as the novel Hyperion, are worked in to the text.
The story is set after the death of Hölderlin's lover, Susette Gontard, and his resulting descent into mental illness (see above/below). The story centres around a young man who visits the great poet, but also includes passages where Hölderlin imagines himself in dialogue with the dead Gontard, typically using the words of his poems and novels. It begins with one of these:
Another midsummer. He woke in its small centre of darkness, his face wet with tears. He lay very still, frightened but attending. High in the town a public clock struck the quarter but only faintly, as though considerately, and of what hour he did not know or care. He felt his state to be unusual. Most often if he woke in the night, and in summer always, he could not lie there, his nervousness would not let him, he must rise and pull a jacket over his nightshirt and leave his room and go down the spiral stairs and begin pacing to and fro in the garden by the river. There, disturbing no one, permitted, he walked himself into a bearable state and some nights could climb the stairs again and resume his sleep. But this midsummer waking was different. After only a little while expecting a worsening, the worst, he felt easier around the heart. He closed his eyes, crossed his arms on his chest, and waited. Quite soon he heard her voice. It – she – was speaking a poem he knew every line of but never allowed himself to utter even in silence, in his head, to himself. She was saying:
Severed and at a distance now and in
The past if I were able still to show you
Something good and you with a sorrow
Equalling mine should you still know my face
Then say how might she expect to find you now,
Your friend: in the gardens where we met again
After the terror and the dark or
Here by the rivers of the unspoilt world?
Strange the feel of tears when you are lying as still as an effigy. The welling up, the flowing over, their wetting your cheeks, all gently. Lying still, face upwards, you seem a part of the earth and your weeping one of her infinite springs. What moved him especially on this occasion was a belief that she was not reciting something she had learned by heart. She was speaking in her own voice. And although he could hear the count and measure and pace of every syllable line by line, and knew the going over, the minute pause, the turning back below to begin the movement towards the next such ending and over- toppling, and though he heard two stanzas and felt as a small heart-shock the leap of faith through the gap between, the trapeze-girl letting go, flying through the air and reaching for a hold again, though he heard and knew and commended and rejoiced in all of that, the upwelling of his tears had another cause. He heard, more persuasively than ever in his life before,
poetry being spoken as the first and native tongue of humankind.
The young man, who narrates large sections of the story, is not named but is I assume intended to be, or is heavily based on, Wilhelm Waiblinger who similarly visited the poet in the 1820s and wrote a book based on this, Hölderlins Leben, Dichtung und Wahnsinn (translated by Will Stone as Hölderlin’s Life, Poetry and Madness).
There are shades here of Fitzgerald's Blue Flower, and one wonders if this would benefit from a greater appreciation of Hölderlin poetry, and it does I think need knowledge of his life to fully appreciate (I found Constantine's introduction to the Selected Poems indispensable - see below for an extract), but this is beautifully done.
The second story, Our Glad (68pp), is equally finely crafted. It is a form of transcript of the visits of a man to his elderly aunt, the eponymous Glad. It begins:
Come in, she said. Start talking! Start listening, more like. Let the asking and the telling and the listening begin where we left off. Or before that, if you want. Listen to me remembering an early part again, the same only different, again. And tell me again or for the first time what you have known for years and what you have just found out. Tell me how you see things now. But come in here first while I make the tea. The eats were ready and waiting on a trolley so there was hardly room for the two of them in the kitchen.
Each chapter marks a different visit over a number of years. Glad reminsces about the family history, but her nephew also plays back to her the stories he, and his own mother (Glad's sister) have told him down the years.
Seven children, she had, that funny old woman with her ear-trumpet in the attic, said our Glad. The first was a Henry but he only lasted six months, he died in the night, poor little thing, Visitation of God, convulsions, they found him in the morning. Help yourself, have another little pie. Or are you ready for your peaches? The other boy was Father, John Willie, your grandfather. The rest were all girls. She rummaged in the shoebox on her lap. Here we are, she said. That’s Aunty Minnie. She stabbed with a finger at a neat little woman with round specs, third row, five from the left, in a group photo of the Tadcaster Choral Society. And she ran the prep school, don’t forget. Like a thrush on the lawn, Glad stabbed, that quick, intent, a moment’s close attending, than stab: that’s her, that’s Aunty Minnie. Only Annie, named after her mother, married. She taught piano, had three sons and a daughter and died of breast cancer after two mastectomies. She married into money – Uncle Bert, the air-raid warden, was a Smith of John Smith’s Breweries, Smith’s Tadcaster Ales – but none of it came our way, needless to say.
A piece in the Manchester Review explains how deftly Constantine manages to cover the breadth and width of Mancunian history over the last one hundred and fifty years ... interwoven with the topographical history of Salford and Manchester. But this reader's abiding impression was actually one of a moving portrayal of an ageing person, still blessedly left with their memories:
In hospital, dying, less than a year later, she murmured she was weary, weary. But sat up and listened and told me another story. I’ll remember her in her talk, so alive, girlish and droll, conjuring up the dead with all their joys and griefs. She had the word that lives and gives life. ‘Our Glad,’ my father called her, his big sister. She was glad in the sense of cheerful and delighted, and in the old sense too, the sense the dictionary calls obsolete: bright, shining, beautiful, which is a sense that was living on, only dormant, among the common modern usages, only waiting for a life to call it up and embody it again: the bright shining of life through her mask of wrinkles, the fun, the joy and the courage of it.
Come on in, our Glad, he said. Start talking.
Living in Hope (41pp) is concerned with the short-lived Paris Commune of March-May 1871, alongside the first wave of Covid in Spring 2020, and with a link also to those seeking asylum from present-day atrocities. It begins:
Dr Wiktoria Okołowicz, Lecturer at the University of Gdańsk, on a year’s study leave in Paris, had found a small and affordable flat up under the eaves in the rue Jouye Rouve with a view from her bedroom of the Parc de Belleville. She was writing a book on the Paris Commune, dealing particularly with the women, their active shaping of it, what they wished it to do, and what it was stopped from doing, for women’s lives. So: a study of what women gave and desired and of their struggle, defeat and disappointment. The material of this subject has been greatly increased by research in recent years, and day by day with a passionate confidence Dr Okołowicz was realizing her idea of it, her hopes in it.
As social-distancing takes hold, see finds herself isolated but better able to focus on her research (including Zoom-call based symposiums) into the suffering and bravery of those who lost their lives in the 'Semaine sanglante', when the French army overthrew the Paris Commune, particularly the women. At one point she quotes a speech given at the Congress of Peace in Lausanne in September 1871 by a woman, who took the name André Léo, one of those who fought on the barricades but survived:
So long as children are born with no angels present but Death who will end their frail lives at the start for want of care; and Poverty who, if they live, will malform their limbs with rickets, stunt their faculties and condemn them to the unceasing pains of cold and hunger and often, alas, even to harshness at home; so long as, on the streets, in the slums, in misery, children are denied even their innocence; so long as their minds receive, at most, the superstitious and dogmatic education that makes our primary schools so sterile, cold and harmful; so long as they grow up with no future but drudgery day after day – most of humanity will be denied their rights; society will live poorly, narrowly, corrupted and defaced by selfishness; equality will be no more than a false hope, and war, the most horrible and savage of all wars, whether unleashed or forever brewing, will dishonour humankind and lay the world to waste.
And, on that theme of suffering children, later she meets and befriends a woman, herself a refugee (my village is commandeered by men with guns, who live by terror and extortion and they took our house and our neighbours’ houses and billeted their killers in them who pray five times a day), and the two children in her ward, one, Félicité, abandoned and the other, Donatien, a boy-soldier from the Congo:
I’ve been thinking too, said Jiyan, as they resumed their walk. I’ve been thinking that I live in a cloud of unknowing. I don’t know whether my father is alive or dead, nor when or how I’ll see my mother and sister in Germany, nor whether I’ll be allowed to stay in France and become a doctor again. I don’t know where Félicité came from nor how she got here. Nor how the priest got Donatien to the Foyer. I am told his organs of speech are in perfect order, he elected to stop talking, I don’t know and nor does anybody else when or if ever he will choose to speak again. I don’t know whether they’ll be allowed to stay in France when they are older, nor whether – this worst of all – I’ll even be allowed to continue looking after them while they are here.
Overall, an impressive and moving collection.
Note
Constantine's account, from his introduction to the Selected Poems, of Hölderlin's relationship with Susette Gontard:
She became the Diotima of his poems and proof to him that ideal life was possible on earth. Her existence in Frankfurt, in the very city of mercantile dreadful night, seemed miraculous. Loving and being loved by her he was, for a time, in a condition of fulfilled humanity. She was Greece recovered and restored to life, she was the woman fit for the New Age. When in France the attempt to change the institutions failed, bringing a new tyranny, many idealists put their hopes in a change of hearts and minds instead. Susette in herself seemed to Hölderlin a guarantor of what humanity had been like and might be like again. The ideal was realised–then lost. They were severed, she died, his mind collapsed.
Hölderlin found his own poetic voice when he met Susette. Prior to that he had been much under the influence of other writers, notably Schiller (whom he adulated). He was writing a novel, Hyperion, when he came to Frankfurt; he re-wrote it when he met her. Its heroine is called Diotima. Forgive me, he said, giving her the second volume, that Diotima dies. The book was dedicated to Susette Gontard, in the words ‘Wem sonst als Dir’ [To whom else but you]. Forced out of her house in September 1798 Hölderlin moved to nearby Homburg and there, for a while, lived on his earnings and tried to make his own way. He reflected on his art and began to write the poems for which he is best known. And he worked at a tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, pushing it through three versions, to no completion. Away from Susette, in Nürtingen, Switzerland and Bordeaux, he wrote the elegies, ‘Bread and Wine’, ‘Homecoming’, ‘Menon’s lament for Diotima’ and the great hymns in Pindar’s style, ‘The Rhine’, ‘The journey’, ‘Germania’ and, later, ‘Patmos’. A whole unique oeuvre was produced. There cannot have been many days during his brief maturity when he was not writing at poems among the very best in German literature. It is a tremendous work, like nobody else’s, his in every line and in its large project.
In the winter of 1801-02 Hölderlin walked to Bordeaux, over the Auvergne. He took up a job as house-tutor there, his last; but left in May and went home, via Paris (where he saw the classical statues Napoleon had stolen from Italy). Susette died in June, of German measles caught whilst nursing her children. When Hölderlin showed himself in Stuttgart and Nürtingen his friends and family thought him out of his mind. But it is not known for certain whether or not he had already learned Susette was dead.
Ich dir noch kennbar bin, die Vergangenheit,
O du Teilhaber meiner Leiden!
Einiges Gute bezeichnen dir kann,
So sage, wie erwartet die Freundin dich?
In jenen Gärten, da nach entsetzlicher
Und dunkler Zeit wir uns gefunden?
Hier an den Strömen der heiligen Urwelt.
The opening verses of Wenn aus der Ferne by Friedrich Hölderlin
Severed and at a distance now and in
The past if I were able still to show you
Something good and you with a sorrow
Equalling mine should you still know my face
Then say how might she expect to find you now,
Your friend: in the gardens where we met again
After the terror and the dark or
Here by the rivers of the unspoilt world?
from David Constantine's translaton in Selected Poems
Constantine goes on to explain the history of the poem in an afterword:
‘Severed and at a distance now…’ [Wenn aus der Ferne …; 2, 262]:
Probably written after 1806, first published 1921. The poem, unfinished, is associated with very late expansions of the novel Hyperion and may be thought of as being spoken by Diotima, though, of course, both she, the heroine of the novel, and her counterpart in real life, Susette Gontard, had died.
David Constantine's Rivers of the Unspoilt World, published by Comma Press (a not-for-profit publisher and development agency specialising in short fiction from the UK and beyond) is a collection of three novellas, each quite distinct, but each with a lyrical and innovative take on historic fiction.
The title story (104pp), is the last in the collection. The title is taken, as per above, from Constantine's translation of Hölderlin's Wenn aus der Ferne, and passages of his translation of this and other poems, as well as the novel Hyperion, are worked in to the text.
The story is set after the death of Hölderlin's lover, Susette Gontard, and his resulting descent into mental illness (see above/below). The story centres around a young man who visits the great poet, but also includes passages where Hölderlin imagines himself in dialogue with the dead Gontard, typically using the words of his poems and novels. It begins with one of these:
Another midsummer. He woke in its small centre of darkness, his face wet with tears. He lay very still, frightened but attending. High in the town a public clock struck the quarter but only faintly, as though considerately, and of what hour he did not know or care. He felt his state to be unusual. Most often if he woke in the night, and in summer always, he could not lie there, his nervousness would not let him, he must rise and pull a jacket over his nightshirt and leave his room and go down the spiral stairs and begin pacing to and fro in the garden by the river. There, disturbing no one, permitted, he walked himself into a bearable state and some nights could climb the stairs again and resume his sleep. But this midsummer waking was different. After only a little while expecting a worsening, the worst, he felt easier around the heart. He closed his eyes, crossed his arms on his chest, and waited. Quite soon he heard her voice. It – she – was speaking a poem he knew every line of but never allowed himself to utter even in silence, in his head, to himself. She was saying:
Severed and at a distance now and in
The past if I were able still to show you
Something good and you with a sorrow
Equalling mine should you still know my face
Then say how might she expect to find you now,
Your friend: in the gardens where we met again
After the terror and the dark or
Here by the rivers of the unspoilt world?
Strange the feel of tears when you are lying as still as an effigy. The welling up, the flowing over, their wetting your cheeks, all gently. Lying still, face upwards, you seem a part of the earth and your weeping one of her infinite springs. What moved him especially on this occasion was a belief that she was not reciting something she had learned by heart. She was speaking in her own voice. And although he could hear the count and measure and pace of every syllable line by line, and knew the going over, the minute pause, the turning back below to begin the movement towards the next such ending and over- toppling, and though he heard two stanzas and felt as a small heart-shock the leap of faith through the gap between, the trapeze-girl letting go, flying through the air and reaching for a hold again, though he heard and knew and commended and rejoiced in all of that, the upwelling of his tears had another cause. He heard, more persuasively than ever in his life before,
poetry being spoken as the first and native tongue of humankind.
The young man, who narrates large sections of the story, is not named but is I assume intended to be, or is heavily based on, Wilhelm Waiblinger who similarly visited the poet in the 1820s and wrote a book based on this, Hölderlins Leben, Dichtung und Wahnsinn (translated by Will Stone as Hölderlin’s Life, Poetry and Madness).
There are shades here of Fitzgerald's Blue Flower, and one wonders if this would benefit from a greater appreciation of Hölderlin poetry, and it does I think need knowledge of his life to fully appreciate (I found Constantine's introduction to the Selected Poems indispensable - see below for an extract), but this is beautifully done.
The second story, Our Glad (68pp), is equally finely crafted. It is a form of transcript of the visits of a man to his elderly aunt, the eponymous Glad. It begins:
Come in, she said. Start talking! Start listening, more like. Let the asking and the telling and the listening begin where we left off. Or before that, if you want. Listen to me remembering an early part again, the same only different, again. And tell me again or for the first time what you have known for years and what you have just found out. Tell me how you see things now. But come in here first while I make the tea. The eats were ready and waiting on a trolley so there was hardly room for the two of them in the kitchen.
Each chapter marks a different visit over a number of years. Glad reminsces about the family history, but her nephew also plays back to her the stories he, and his own mother (Glad's sister) have told him down the years.
Seven children, she had, that funny old woman with her ear-trumpet in the attic, said our Glad. The first was a Henry but he only lasted six months, he died in the night, poor little thing, Visitation of God, convulsions, they found him in the morning. Help yourself, have another little pie. Or are you ready for your peaches? The other boy was Father, John Willie, your grandfather. The rest were all girls. She rummaged in the shoebox on her lap. Here we are, she said. That’s Aunty Minnie. She stabbed with a finger at a neat little woman with round specs, third row, five from the left, in a group photo of the Tadcaster Choral Society. And she ran the prep school, don’t forget. Like a thrush on the lawn, Glad stabbed, that quick, intent, a moment’s close attending, than stab: that’s her, that’s Aunty Minnie. Only Annie, named after her mother, married. She taught piano, had three sons and a daughter and died of breast cancer after two mastectomies. She married into money – Uncle Bert, the air-raid warden, was a Smith of John Smith’s Breweries, Smith’s Tadcaster Ales – but none of it came our way, needless to say.
A piece in the Manchester Review explains how deftly Constantine manages to cover the breadth and width of Mancunian history over the last one hundred and fifty years ... interwoven with the topographical history of Salford and Manchester. But this reader's abiding impression was actually one of a moving portrayal of an ageing person, still blessedly left with their memories:
In hospital, dying, less than a year later, she murmured she was weary, weary. But sat up and listened and told me another story. I’ll remember her in her talk, so alive, girlish and droll, conjuring up the dead with all their joys and griefs. She had the word that lives and gives life. ‘Our Glad,’ my father called her, his big sister. She was glad in the sense of cheerful and delighted, and in the old sense too, the sense the dictionary calls obsolete: bright, shining, beautiful, which is a sense that was living on, only dormant, among the common modern usages, only waiting for a life to call it up and embody it again: the bright shining of life through her mask of wrinkles, the fun, the joy and the courage of it.
Come on in, our Glad, he said. Start talking.
Living in Hope (41pp) is concerned with the short-lived Paris Commune of March-May 1871, alongside the first wave of Covid in Spring 2020, and with a link also to those seeking asylum from present-day atrocities. It begins:
Dr Wiktoria Okołowicz, Lecturer at the University of Gdańsk, on a year’s study leave in Paris, had found a small and affordable flat up under the eaves in the rue Jouye Rouve with a view from her bedroom of the Parc de Belleville. She was writing a book on the Paris Commune, dealing particularly with the women, their active shaping of it, what they wished it to do, and what it was stopped from doing, for women’s lives. So: a study of what women gave and desired and of their struggle, defeat and disappointment. The material of this subject has been greatly increased by research in recent years, and day by day with a passionate confidence Dr Okołowicz was realizing her idea of it, her hopes in it.
As social-distancing takes hold, see finds herself isolated but better able to focus on her research (including Zoom-call based symposiums) into the suffering and bravery of those who lost their lives in the 'Semaine sanglante', when the French army overthrew the Paris Commune, particularly the women. At one point she quotes a speech given at the Congress of Peace in Lausanne in September 1871 by a woman, who took the name André Léo, one of those who fought on the barricades but survived:
So long as children are born with no angels present but Death who will end their frail lives at the start for want of care; and Poverty who, if they live, will malform their limbs with rickets, stunt their faculties and condemn them to the unceasing pains of cold and hunger and often, alas, even to harshness at home; so long as, on the streets, in the slums, in misery, children are denied even their innocence; so long as their minds receive, at most, the superstitious and dogmatic education that makes our primary schools so sterile, cold and harmful; so long as they grow up with no future but drudgery day after day – most of humanity will be denied their rights; society will live poorly, narrowly, corrupted and defaced by selfishness; equality will be no more than a false hope, and war, the most horrible and savage of all wars, whether unleashed or forever brewing, will dishonour humankind and lay the world to waste.
And, on that theme of suffering children, later she meets and befriends a woman, herself a refugee (my village is commandeered by men with guns, who live by terror and extortion and they took our house and our neighbours’ houses and billeted their killers in them who pray five times a day), and the two children in her ward, one, Félicité, abandoned and the other, Donatien, a boy-soldier from the Congo:
I’ve been thinking too, said Jiyan, as they resumed their walk. I’ve been thinking that I live in a cloud of unknowing. I don’t know whether my father is alive or dead, nor when or how I’ll see my mother and sister in Germany, nor whether I’ll be allowed to stay in France and become a doctor again. I don’t know where Félicité came from nor how she got here. Nor how the priest got Donatien to the Foyer. I am told his organs of speech are in perfect order, he elected to stop talking, I don’t know and nor does anybody else when or if ever he will choose to speak again. I don’t know whether they’ll be allowed to stay in France when they are older, nor whether – this worst of all – I’ll even be allowed to continue looking after them while they are here.
Overall, an impressive and moving collection.
Note
Constantine's account, from his introduction to the Selected Poems, of Hölderlin's relationship with Susette Gontard:
She became the Diotima of his poems and proof to him that ideal life was possible on earth. Her existence in Frankfurt, in the very city of mercantile dreadful night, seemed miraculous. Loving and being loved by her he was, for a time, in a condition of fulfilled humanity. She was Greece recovered and restored to life, she was the woman fit for the New Age. When in France the attempt to change the institutions failed, bringing a new tyranny, many idealists put their hopes in a change of hearts and minds instead. Susette in herself seemed to Hölderlin a guarantor of what humanity had been like and might be like again. The ideal was realised–then lost. They were severed, she died, his mind collapsed.
Hölderlin found his own poetic voice when he met Susette. Prior to that he had been much under the influence of other writers, notably Schiller (whom he adulated). He was writing a novel, Hyperion, when he came to Frankfurt; he re-wrote it when he met her. Its heroine is called Diotima. Forgive me, he said, giving her the second volume, that Diotima dies. The book was dedicated to Susette Gontard, in the words ‘Wem sonst als Dir’ [To whom else but you]. Forced out of her house in September 1798 Hölderlin moved to nearby Homburg and there, for a while, lived on his earnings and tried to make his own way. He reflected on his art and began to write the poems for which he is best known. And he worked at a tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, pushing it through three versions, to no completion. Away from Susette, in Nürtingen, Switzerland and Bordeaux, he wrote the elegies, ‘Bread and Wine’, ‘Homecoming’, ‘Menon’s lament for Diotima’ and the great hymns in Pindar’s style, ‘The Rhine’, ‘The journey’, ‘Germania’ and, later, ‘Patmos’. A whole unique oeuvre was produced. There cannot have been many days during his brief maturity when he was not writing at poems among the very best in German literature. It is a tremendous work, like nobody else’s, his in every line and in its large project.
In the winter of 1801-02 Hölderlin walked to Bordeaux, over the Auvergne. He took up a job as house-tutor there, his last; but left in May and went home, via Paris (where he saw the classical statues Napoleon had stolen from Italy). Susette died in June, of German measles caught whilst nursing her children. When Hölderlin showed himself in Stuttgart and Nürtingen his friends and family thought him out of his mind. But it is not known for certain whether or not he had already learned Susette was dead.
February 24, 2023
At the time I write this, there are 6 reviews of this book on Goodreads. I wonder if most, or even all, of those 6 reviewers read ARCs because they all seem to say that the first story in the book is “Our Glad” whereas, in my version, “Our Glad” is the second story after “Living in Hope”.
Unfortunately, this change in the order of the stories meant that my enjoyment of each story was significantly less than of its predecessor which essentially explains my rating.
In my copy, the first story has an interesting structure and, for me, an emotional impact. It tells the story of the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871 but it does this through the eyes of a woman living in Paris during COVID lockdown. She takes part in regular Zoom meetings where each participant has agreed to speak but, for reasons explained in the story, ends up leaving that group and meets some refugees. Crucially, to explain the emotional impact I mentioned, those refugees help to restore her and get her back to her research.
Then it’s “Our Glad” that it seems everyone else read first. A man visits his aunt who regales him with family history. It’s a gentle story and it covers decades of northern British history. It was OK but I preferred the opening story.
The final story, which is almost half of the book and could have been published on its own as a novella, well, I don’t really know what it is about because I didn’t really understand it and I didn’t like it enough to make any kind of effort to understand it. It was hard enough to work it all out when I was reading every word, but as I approached the end I started skipping bits and that just made it totally incomprehensible.
Just chalk it up as one that didn’t work for me (apart from the opening story that I liked). And move on.
Addendum: I was reminded by friends when I posted this review that I had already sampled this book in an advance copy and my comments on that earlier read are not in sync with my comments here. There’s a reason. The advance copy I read had, as I have said, the stories in a different order. And I took a dislike to one I read first then (the second one in this published version) and only read 10 pages. Then I posted a comment on this book thinking I was posting a comment on a different book, so my comments were, I agree, confusing for anyone who saw both. Anyway, you’re not interested in all that.
Unfortunately, this change in the order of the stories meant that my enjoyment of each story was significantly less than of its predecessor which essentially explains my rating.
In my copy, the first story has an interesting structure and, for me, an emotional impact. It tells the story of the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871 but it does this through the eyes of a woman living in Paris during COVID lockdown. She takes part in regular Zoom meetings where each participant has agreed to speak but, for reasons explained in the story, ends up leaving that group and meets some refugees. Crucially, to explain the emotional impact I mentioned, those refugees help to restore her and get her back to her research.
Then it’s “Our Glad” that it seems everyone else read first. A man visits his aunt who regales him with family history. It’s a gentle story and it covers decades of northern British history. It was OK but I preferred the opening story.
The final story, which is almost half of the book and could have been published on its own as a novella, well, I don’t really know what it is about because I didn’t really understand it and I didn’t like it enough to make any kind of effort to understand it. It was hard enough to work it all out when I was reading every word, but as I approached the end I started skipping bits and that just made it totally incomprehensible.
Just chalk it up as one that didn’t work for me (apart from the opening story that I liked). And move on.
Addendum: I was reminded by friends when I posted this review that I had already sampled this book in an advance copy and my comments on that earlier read are not in sync with my comments here. There’s a reason. The advance copy I read had, as I have said, the stories in a different order. And I took a dislike to one I read first then (the second one in this published version) and only read 10 pages. Then I posted a comment on this book thinking I was posting a comment on a different book, so my comments were, I agree, confusing for anyone who saw both. Anyway, you’re not interested in all that.
December 3, 2022
Intense and powerful, as usual for Constantine.
October 29, 2022
This book contains three stories, two are longish and the third is novella length. They are historical fiction but somewhat indirectly.
The first, titled Our Glad concerns a man's discussions with his aunt over a number of years. They start when the man visits his mother, who was married to the aunt's brother, and continue as she slips into dementia and dies and after until the aunt dies. The man is interested in his family's history and the people in his family, and he hears new things and different versions from his aunt. Visits are described in the way they would naturally occur. The aunt asking how his mother is, preparing him a snack and tea, and with the conversation often getting diverted. It was so realistic. My aunt was a source of family history for me and often conversations were like those here, with many interruptions and often with food and drink. This was a five-star story for me.
The second addressed the Paris Commune but in a very convoluted manner. A professor was in Paris writing a paper on the Paris Commune. She was in a group that would meet via Zoom periodically with each professor taking a turn discussing their paper. Another professor reached a very different conclusion about the Commune in his paper and it has thrown our professor badly off her game and she withdraws. She is drawn out by two young immigrant children and the immigrant woman caring for them. The author somehow brings the story together and it is remarkably touching. I had never heard of the Paris Commune and had to do a bit of research. This was a four-star story for me.
The last story has the same name as the book. It concerns a little known (and unknown to me) German Romantic poet named Hölderlein who is in a psychiatric hospital and visited by a young man. I found it more difficult than the other two stories to follow and it would require a re-read to appreciate it sufficiently to write a cohesive comment about it.
Overall, I enjoyed the writing and the rather unusual and differing structure of these stories.
The first, titled Our Glad concerns a man's discussions with his aunt over a number of years. They start when the man visits his mother, who was married to the aunt's brother, and continue as she slips into dementia and dies and after until the aunt dies. The man is interested in his family's history and the people in his family, and he hears new things and different versions from his aunt. Visits are described in the way they would naturally occur. The aunt asking how his mother is, preparing him a snack and tea, and with the conversation often getting diverted. It was so realistic. My aunt was a source of family history for me and often conversations were like those here, with many interruptions and often with food and drink. This was a five-star story for me.
The second addressed the Paris Commune but in a very convoluted manner. A professor was in Paris writing a paper on the Paris Commune. She was in a group that would meet via Zoom periodically with each professor taking a turn discussing their paper. Another professor reached a very different conclusion about the Commune in his paper and it has thrown our professor badly off her game and she withdraws. She is drawn out by two young immigrant children and the immigrant woman caring for them. The author somehow brings the story together and it is remarkably touching. I had never heard of the Paris Commune and had to do a bit of research. This was a four-star story for me.
The last story has the same name as the book. It concerns a little known (and unknown to me) German Romantic poet named Hölderlein who is in a psychiatric hospital and visited by a young man. I found it more difficult than the other two stories to follow and it would require a re-read to appreciate it sufficiently to write a cohesive comment about it.
Overall, I enjoyed the writing and the rather unusual and differing structure of these stories.
March 14, 2023
This volume consists of three novellas, all of them original in construction and featuring Constantine’s excellent ear for prose (his poetry’s also excellent). The first involves a young Polish woman obsessed with the Paris Commune of 1871; it’s written in a very tight third-person, with very little dialogue. It’s moving and haunting.
The second novella is the most original in form: a dialogue (embedded in third-person narration) between an old woman and her nephew over a period of time, mostly about family members. It’s often hard to tell which is speaking, and this uncertainty creates a dynamic that is very rewarding despite its difficulty. I had trouble getting into the third and longest of the novellas, the title novella, and didn’t stick with it.
This volume is available in the US in an expensive e-book edition, and is more than worth the price. If you haven't read Constantine, give him a look. He's one of our great contemporary writers in all formats: short fiction, poetry, novel, and translation from the German.
The second novella is the most original in form: a dialogue (embedded in third-person narration) between an old woman and her nephew over a period of time, mostly about family members. It’s often hard to tell which is speaking, and this uncertainty creates a dynamic that is very rewarding despite its difficulty. I had trouble getting into the third and longest of the novellas, the title novella, and didn’t stick with it.
This volume is available in the US in an expensive e-book edition, and is more than worth the price. If you haven't read Constantine, give him a look. He's one of our great contemporary writers in all formats: short fiction, poetry, novel, and translation from the German.
December 27, 2022
An interesting if for me uneven collection of three, very different novellas, perhaps only (as the blurb implies) linked by the idea of exploring the past.
The first story – “Our Glad” was my favourite. Over nearly 70 pages written in a gentle and slightly old-fashioned style it unfolds both the story of a family (possibly a part autobiographical one) and some 150 years of Northern British history. The set up is of a nephew paying regular visits to his ageing Aunt – the Aunt telling stories from the family history (some so well known the nephew can tell them, some more revelatory), and the nephew giving some colour from internet researches. What is most moving about the story is the detailed picture it gives of everyday life only a few generations ago – including the War and particularly the late-era of workhouses. If I had a reservation here it is that non-fictional equivalent – for example based on collected verbal or written recollections (of which I have read some ones covering similar periods for my home country of Norfolk) are more genuine and effective.
The second story of around 40 pages was from the opening quite a contrast in tone (also old fashioned but rather formal/distant) and in content – as dealing with a historic event (the fall of the 1871 Paris Commune) through a modern lockdown lens. The main character is a Polish researcher living in Paris – after an impassioned defence of her strong views on the horrors of the atrocities committed by the French army on the surrendering Commune members – particularly the women – she leaves her online discussion groups and then befriends some refugees who restore her determination to continue her researches.
The titular third story is over 100 pages but was largely lost on me in both comprehension and enjoyment due to my complete lack of familiarity with or interest in its subject – Frederich Hölderlin, a poet in the German Romantic movement.
The first story – “Our Glad” was my favourite. Over nearly 70 pages written in a gentle and slightly old-fashioned style it unfolds both the story of a family (possibly a part autobiographical one) and some 150 years of Northern British history. The set up is of a nephew paying regular visits to his ageing Aunt – the Aunt telling stories from the family history (some so well known the nephew can tell them, some more revelatory), and the nephew giving some colour from internet researches. What is most moving about the story is the detailed picture it gives of everyday life only a few generations ago – including the War and particularly the late-era of workhouses. If I had a reservation here it is that non-fictional equivalent – for example based on collected verbal or written recollections (of which I have read some ones covering similar periods for my home country of Norfolk) are more genuine and effective.
The second story of around 40 pages was from the opening quite a contrast in tone (also old fashioned but rather formal/distant) and in content – as dealing with a historic event (the fall of the 1871 Paris Commune) through a modern lockdown lens. The main character is a Polish researcher living in Paris – after an impassioned defence of her strong views on the horrors of the atrocities committed by the French army on the surrendering Commune members – particularly the women – she leaves her online discussion groups and then befriends some refugees who restore her determination to continue her researches.
The titular third story is over 100 pages but was largely lost on me in both comprehension and enjoyment due to my complete lack of familiarity with or interest in its subject – Frederich Hölderlin, a poet in the German Romantic movement.
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