5★ “A night watchman found the lovers sleeping in a knot of arms, legs, and tulle, enveloped in the foam of a ruined wedding gown in one of the galleri5★ “A night watchman found the lovers sleeping in a knot of arms, legs, and tulle, enveloped in the foam of a ruined wedding gown in one of the galleries of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.“
That opens this quirky little fantasy by noted Chilean-American author Isabel Allende. She writes in both Spanish and English – this began its life in Spanish and she translated it into English. As a result, it has the interesting cadence of a translated work, which I enjoy.
Surely anything could happen in a place (or palace, as the girl insists) like this. She is wearing a wedding dress, but the fellow is starkers, still with the obvious signs of arousal, which a thoughtful policeman tries to hide by hanging his hat on it.
Why was she clothed? ...she was in her white dress because I couldn’t unfasten the little buttons, tiny as fleas.’”
She was escaping her wedding, saw this guy, was instantly smitten, and off they raced together, straight into the museum where the fellow said ” ‘we did it like rabbits all over the place.’ “
But how did they get in? Apparently everyone knows the building has magical properties. The detective investigates.
“He was determined to be delicate with the girl so as not to frighten her. ‘Are you a whore?’ he asked.”
Allende tells this story with such heart-warming affection that I’m prepared to believe anything . A bit of bewitching and floating through palaces can’t be all bad. It’s the tonic I needed.
Thanks to #NetGalley and Amazon Original Stories for a copy of #LoversAtTheMuseum for review. It’s free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. ...more
5★ (I read it - no audio.) “I picked up the pen chained to the register stand, dipped it in the brass inkwell, and then, as I leaned over the open book5★ (I read it - no audio.) “I picked up the pen chained to the register stand, dipped it in the brass inkwell, and then, as I leaned over the open book, there occurred the first of the many surprises the night would have in store for me—my name, Jorge Luis Borges, had already been written there, and the ink was not yet dry.”
This is my kind of story – mysterious dream or time-shifting reality? The author tells us he checked into a hotel but has discovered his still-damp signature already on the register. The owner apologises for asking him to sign again.
“ ‘I thought you'd already gone upstairs,’ the owner said to me. Then he looked at me more closely and corrected himself: ‘Oh, I beg your pardon, sir. You look so much like the other gentleman, but you are younger.’
‘What room is he in?’ I asked.
‘He asked for Room 19,’ came the reply.
It was as I had feared.”
We aren’t told what it was he feared or why, but he races to the back room to find himself older and dying in bed.
I found the conversation between Borges the Younger and Borges the Elder interesting as the Younger tries to trick the Elder into some kind of explanation. Is this a dream, and if so, who is dreaming whom?
Is the Younger dreaming his older self, or is the Elder dreaming something from his past, or perhaps even re-dreaming this one that he first dreamed when young?
I really enjoyed the mind-games this made me play. The Younger Borges recognises the voice that greets him as what he sounds like himself on recordings.
“‘How odd,’ it was saying, ‘we are two yet we are one. But then nothing is odd in dreams.’
‘Then ...’ I asked fearfully, ‘all this is a dream?’
‘It is, I am sure, my last dream.’ He gestured toward the empty bottle on the marble nightstand. ‘You, however, shall have much to dream, before you come to this night. What date is it for you?’
‘I'm not sure,’ I said, rattled. ‘But yesterday was my sixty-first birthday.’
‘When in your waking state you reach this night again, yesterday will have been your eighty-fourth.
Today is August 25, 1983.’
‘So long to wait,’ I murmured.
‘Not for me,’ he said shortly.”
There is something about the quality of a dream that can make it feel real, whether it’s because it originated in my own mind and mine alone (I assume!), or that I’m in a kind of captive state when I’m dreaming it.
I can imagine dreaming something like this and even having a conversation like this in a dream. It’s curious and intriguing and it’s Borges.
I read it in the anthology Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges and with the Short Story Club Group here on Goodreads, which is always a good place for interesting conversations.
2.5~3★ “ ‘I do not know if it is a mental twist which I have always had, or if it is the effect of some of those silly tales which old nurses use to fr2.5~3★ “ ‘I do not know if it is a mental twist which I have always had, or if it is the effect of some of those silly tales which old nurses use to frighten children into quiet and obedience, but ever since I was very young nothing has caused me so much fright and horror as the sight, or even the thought, of a woman alone out of doors at a late hour of the night.’ ”
This is a short ‘ghost’ story by a 19th century Spanish author who tells us Gabriel is sitting with five friends, all having ridden mules up into the forest to collect specimens. They have stopped to tuck into their hamper of food and wine, when Gabriel begins to talk about a couple he knew and what happened to them. But first he offers an explanation about himself.
“ ‘You may call me a visionary if you like, but it has been my fortune or misfortune in life that I have always been regarded as a materialist, a man of modern thought, not believing in things unseen. In fact, a positivist. Well, I may be so, but my positivism includes an acknowledgment of the mysterious influences of Nature …’ ”
He says just because we can’t explain these influences doesn’t mean they don’t happen. He says he’ll tell the story – you can decide. It happened in the hot summer of 1875.
“ ‘I was not the hero of the strange occurrence which I'm going to relate to you—but listen, and then tell me what explanation you can give me—natural, physical, scientific, whatever you think will best explain the case, if explanation is at all possible.’”
He carries on with his tale of a friend who was grieving the loss of his sweetheart, and who admits to a terrible fear of seeing a woman walking outdoors alone at night. That is the friend’s remark in the opening quotation.
How he became afraid and what happens to him is the subject of Gabriel’s story to the group of men.
The version I’m reading (not this one) is translated from the Spanish by P.A. Schultz. I don’t see it on Goodreads, but the story in English is only 20 pages or so. This was the shortest edition I could find to select in English.
It may have been more impressive in 1881 in Spanish than it is in translation today, but it’s a curious tale anyway.
5★ “Speed is of the essence, and I barely use my head as the rules ingrained in me issue instructions directly to my body.”
This is how Keiko likes to o5★ “Speed is of the essence, and I barely use my head as the rules ingrained in me issue instructions directly to my body.”
This is how Keiko likes to operate, with direction. She is a young woman who has always been different. She tells us this in her own voice. I listened to the audio, which Nancy Wu delivers very smoothly. It’s easy to tell who’s talking, and her tone is just right for this girl/woman who doesn’t quite fit in.
At nursery school (pre-school), Keiko found a dead bird outside that she knew must have been someone’s pet, because it’s a pretty blue budgie. Tears from everyone, but not from her.
She shows her mother (and the other mothers), and says “ ‘Let’s eat it!’” ... it’s dead anyway.
“There were lots more there in the park, so all we had to do was catch some and take them home. I couldn’t understand why should we bury the bird instead of eating it.
‘Look how cute little Mr. Budgie is!’ my mother said earnestly ‘Let’s make a grave for him over there, and everyone can lay flowers on it.’
And that’s what we did. Everyone was crying for the poor dead bird as they went around murdering flowers, plucking their stalks, exclaiming, ‘What lovely flowers! Little Mr. Budgie will definitely be pleased.’ They looked so bizarre I thought they must all be out of their minds.”
You get the idea. When she grows up, she gets a part-time job in the Smile Mart, a convenience store that’s open 24/7, every day of the year. She has a uniform, is trained what to say, how to smile like the Smile Mart sign, how to behave, and she absolutely loves it!
She thinks often about how the cells in our body are changing all the time, so that we are becoming different bodies, and she notices how different kinds of people speak. She also notices how people she knows seem to change the way they speak, and wonders who they’ve been talking to and so picked up their speech patterns.
She’s not stupid or silly. She has a good capacity for learning. She’s probably autistic and except for the convenience store training, she has kind of used Applied Behaviour Therapy on herself. She copies people’s speech patterns so she won’t sound too different, and practices how to speak, but of course her cheery convenience store patter can still sound odd in other settings.
[I think it’s something like going to a big banquet where you aren’t sure how or where to sit, which fork and knife to use, how to speak to your neighbour or the people across from you - the accepted ‘norm’ for those who are familiar with banquets. You want to appear normal for the duration, but you don’t intend to behave like that regularly if you can help it. But I digress.]
I don’t think ‘normal’ people are - normal, that is. Is there such a thing? She just wants to be able to appear normal. Some years later, at a family BBQ where they pressure her to try online dating, they stand up to get their food when the meat is ready.
“The next thing I knew, just like that time in elementary school, they all turned their backs on me and started edging away, staring curiously at me over their shoulders as if contemplating some ghastly life-form. Oh, I thought absently. I’ve become a foreign object. . . . The normal world has no room for exceptions. It always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of. So THAT’s why I need to be cured. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me
Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.”
This is a warm-hearted story that shows exactly how silly we all are, saying and doing things the way we do without thinking about it. So-called normal people automatically copy the habits of others, and when someone like Keiko questions why (like why bury a bird), they think she’s the weird one.
She is unique and she’s a delight and I loved her for it. Nobody’s going to expurgate her on my watch!...more
4★ “He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not4★ “He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the difference between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels.”
What? You may well ask. A peasant family has been trying to clean out their house, thinking it’s the filth making their newborn child sick. When they return home in a storm, they discover an old man groaning, lying in the mud behind their house. He has huge wings, but they are so stunned by his presence and his manner, that they don’t know quite what to make of him.
“Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.
‘He’s an angel,’ she told them. ‘He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.’”
The child recovers, and feeling grateful, the family considers setting the winged man free, sending him off to sea on a raft. Maybe he’s a Norwegian sailor. But the locals have come to look at him, like a circus animal, and the priest warned them about him being a trick of the devil.
Whatever he is, he’s different, foreign, and decidedly odd, so into the chicken coop he goes (like other winged creatures, although nobody’s suggested he’s a bird). The ‘host’ family decides to charge people to see him. Some bring invalids.
“The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat.”
Whether they believe the old man is a freak of nature, a foreign intruder, or a religious phenomenon (for good or evil), his treatment is inhumane and eventually commercial.
I don’t pretend to know the meaning of the story. Marquez usually leaves me with an overall feeling, even if I can’t pinpoint why. This one reminds me of how intolerant I can be of intolerance (including my own) - the fear of the unfamiliar, the initial negative reaction against someone we perceive as different.
It’s all about the perception. What would they have thought if he’d arrived with a winged wife and cheerful children? What if he had spoken their language – clearly and kindly?
I am aware that I am reading a translation from a country very different from my own. I’d like to think I would be equally stunned, but not intolerant or cruel. Easy to say - it hasn’t happened to me – yet.
5★ “Moreover, he had a peculiar knack, as he walked in the street, of arriving beneath a window when all sorts of rubbish was being flung out of it: he5★ “Moreover, he had a peculiar knack, as he walked in the street, of arriving beneath a window when all sorts of rubbish was being flung out of it: hence he always bore about on his hat melon and watermelon rinds, and other such stuff.”
This is a story of the absurd, said to be the first realism of its kind in Russian literature. I can’t speak to that, but I will say it’s funny, tragic and kind of heart-breaking.
Akakii Akakievich is a “titular councillor”, a poorly paid, minor public official in Petersburg, where he contentedly copies documents. He is a quiet, easily disturbed man who was so flustered when asked to update a document by changing a few words as he copied it, that they never asked him again.
He is a source of amusement at work.
“No respect was shown him in the department. The janitor not only did not rise from his seat when he passed, but never even glanced at him, as if only a fly had flown through the reception-room. … But he served, as his companions, the wits, put it, like a buckle in a button-hole.”
I can’t read Russian, but I’m inclined to think this means he’s a square peg in a round hole, as far as the department and everyday life goes. Of course, it could also mean, that once the buckle has been wedged through the buttonhole, it’s hard to budge. I feel pretty certain it means he doesn’t fit in.
This poor man leads a drab, solitary life in such a distracted state of mind that he is often unaware of everything around him. Thinking he’s walking in a line, it’s only when a horse breathes down the back of his neck that he realises he’s walking in the road.
People stare, but remember he’s also got that hat with melon rinds on it, so I’d stare, too, I’m afraid. He may be oblivious to some things, others he can’t ignore.
“There exists in Petersburg a powerful foe of all who receive four hundred rubles salary a year, or thereabouts. This foe is no other than our Northern cold, although it is said to be very wholesome.”
(Of course ‘they’ still try to convince us of that.) Meanwhile, Akakii has been feeling the cold and finally thinks to check what’s wrong with his coat. Apparently, he can see through it, the fabric has worn so thin.
“You must know that Akakii Akakievich s overcoat served as an object of ridicule to the officials: they even deprived it of the noble name of overcoat, and called it a kapota [a woman’s cloak]. In fact, it was of singular make: its collar diminished year by year, but served to patch its other parts.”
Off to visit Petrovich, the tailor, for some more patchwork. Akakii has a peculiar manner of speech, all disjointed words and phrases. He shows the tailor the coat, or what’s left of it.
“ ‘But I, here, this, Petrovich, ... an overcoat, cloth . . . here you see, everywhere, in different places, it is quite strong . . . it is a little dusty, and looks old, but it is new, only here in one place it is a little ... on the back, and here on one of the shoulders, it is a little worn, yes, here on this shoulder it is a little ... do you see? this is all. And a little work . . .’
Impossible. There’s nothing to attach the patches to – a new coat is needed. From here on, we see that Akakii isn’t entirely unobservant, as he plans the best time to approach price negotiations, based on when the tailor will be in the right mood after a night out.
He also plans to save money by walking more lightly so as not to wear his shoes out, and by taking off his clothes as soon as he gets home and wearing an old cotton dressing-gown. The rest of this story does not go at all as expected.
Read the story. The language phrasing and rhythms are foreign when translated, but the characters and story (and absurdity) are still entertaining today, nearly two centuries after it was written. The bureaucrats and the class strata are still with us.
1★ “The last moments of this heroic and dedicated couple were such as to make the gods themselves weep. The lieutenant’s age, it should be noted, was 1★ “The last moments of this heroic and dedicated couple were such as to make the gods themselves weep. The lieutenant’s age, it should be noted, was thirty-one, his wife’s twenty-three; and it was not half a year since the celebration of their marriage.”
CONTENT WARNING for sex and graphic suicide ritual by which the author also chose to end his own life in 1970.
What an absolutely harrowing story. The opening explains the circumstances in which this young Japanese couple choose to commit suicide, he by disembowelment (seppuku), and she by loyally stabbing herself after necessarily serving as his witness.
These two are passionately devoted to each other, living in a traditional manner where Shinji is the man of the house around whom all life revolves, while Reiko is completely, adoringly, happily subservient to him. It’s not her submission to him, but the following that disturbs me the most.
“On the god shelf below the stairway, alongside the tablet from the Great Ise Shrine, were set photographs of their Imperial Majesties, and regularly every morning, before leaving for duty, the lieutenant would stand with his wife at this hallowed place and together they would bow their heads low. The offering water was renewed each morning, and the sacred sprig of sasaki was always green and fresh. Their lives were lived beneath the solemn protection of the gods and were filled with an intense happiness which set every fiber in their bodies trembling.”
I feel it’s partly their passion for each other that has spilled over into their dedication to the gods and their majesties. They don’t want to test their luck, so they practice the rituals. Suddenly, one night, Shinji comes home saying his friends were among the insurgents involved in the current mutiny against the government.
“Reiko recalled momentarily the faces of high-spirited young officers, friends of her husband, who had come to the house occasionally as guests.”
Shinji says he will be expected to lead an attack on them tomorrow, and he has been given permission to spend one night at home first.
He won’t attack his friends.
“ ‘Tonight I shall cut my stomach.’ Reiko did not flinch.”
They go through long rituals of bathing and preparing themselves and then enjoy a long session of lovemaking.
“The agonies they could not yet feel, the distant pains of death, had refined their awareness of pleasure.”
The lovemaking varies from tender and exquisite to florid and overblown erotica, mixing pain and pleasure. Shinji finally stops, only because he knows the strength he will need to carry out his vow.
It feels like a five-star read for power and a no-star read for the sin of glorifying the horrific, gory, bloody act by which the author had probably already decided to end his own life.
Mishima also wrote, acted, directed, and produced this story as a short film, “Yukoku, or the Rite of Love and Death”. He plays the lieutenant, perhaps as a dress rehearsal? What a creepy thought. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=des...
I’ve decided to give it one star, only because I want to make it obvious I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone (unless, of course, you want to wallow in descriptions of pulsating entrails). ...more
3.5~4★ “He was an outcast here: Most of the people in Beta Israel were Ethiopian Falasha, like this elderly lady, but others were Ethiopians trying to 3.5~4★ “He was an outcast here: Most of the people in Beta Israel were Ethiopian Falasha, like this elderly lady, but others were Ethiopians trying to join the camp to find their own form of salvation. They were unwelcome. Then there were Eritreans, like him, who were hated by both the Ethiopian Falasha and the Ethiopians.”
This was a difficult read for me for many reasons. Reading about people struggling to escape persecution is always hard, because I feel guilty for not knowing more about it.
The narrator describes how he went from Eritrea to Israel. He is called variously Dawoud, Dawit, or David, depending where he is and which nationality he is pretending to be. He is resourceful and determined, and manages to get himself coached by Saba, a woman who helps him and gives him a history, because he tells us he has none.
As he moves between countries, dodging, hiding, being questioned, he cleverly twists his stories to suit his interrogator. The author also moves us back and forth between the parts of his story, using the different names, Dawoud, Dawit, or David, which helps to give us a sense of where he is. His main concern is to get safely to Israel and freedom. If he has to ‘be’ a Jew to do so, fine. He studies.
There are long passages where he is being interviewed by a European to decide his fate. His story becomes like the 1001 nights – a more interesting aspect added to his story every so often to keep the man listening to him. Finally, he realises that the European has heard every possible reason or excuse a migrant can give and is about to turn him away.
“He thought about getting up and walking out of the meeting, since his fate was already clear. But then a new idea took hold of him, filling him with energy. He would tell the truth. He would tell his own story, and the European would hear something he’d never heard before. He would tell his own great secret for the sake of his salvation.
Again, he lifted his head. The European’s lips still held the traces of a smirk, but this quickly slid off when he saw David staring into his eyes so firmly it confused him. The European set the pen aside and resettled his thick glasses, then clasped his hands and placed them under his chin, looking keenly at David.
David said: ‘I’m Free Gadli.’
The translator faltered, then dropped into silence and turned to the session’s secretary, who hadn’t written a single letter but was instead staring at David in astonishment. The European was confused as he saw the young men’s expressions but couldn’t understanding what was going on. He angrily ordered his translator to explain. The translator looked at David, as if giving him one last chance to take it back. Then he cleared his throat and translated in a low voice: ‘He says he’s one of the “fruits of the struggle.” ’
The European understood nothing from this literal translation, so the translator had to explain the meaning. ‘In Eritrea, that’s what children are called if they’re born of a relationship between soldiers on the battlefield that goes against religious law.’
The European knit his brow and said with great interest: ‘This is new.’ Then he urged David to tell his story.
It was only at this moment that David felt the enormity of his decision. It wasn’t easy for him to pull from his chest a story he’d grown used to hiding in the dark. But on the other hand, he wanted to survive, no matter what.”
If I understand this, David claims he is one of the several soldiers’ babies, born on the battlefield and shared among a group of new soldier mothers, backpacked into war, nobody never knowing whose baby is whose or who the real parents are.
I don’t know the truth of the history, but judging by the rest of the book, this was indeed David’s history – bred to be a future anonymous fighter for Eritrea.
“ ‘The first time I’d opened my eyes, it was on a battlefield. I had moved from one babysitter to another, and they were all my mother. The fighters took turns tying me to their backs. With them, I would go up hills, down across the plains, and stretch out in the trenches. The first toy I ever played with was an empty Kalashnikov—or maybe it was loaded, who knows! The first word I ever spoke was a bad attempt to imitate the sound of someone ordering an artilleryman to fire. Before that, I had been happy imitating the sounds of shelling, with perfect success.’ ”
It's a tremendous story, told well by its Eritrean author. I feel that it has lost something in translation, over which I sometimes stumbled, which is why I haven’t rated it more highly. But I’m certainly no expert on translation, and the fault may well be mine.
Thanks to NetGalley and AmazonCrossing for the copy for review.
I believe AmazonCrossing publications are generally Read Now for all NetGalley reviewers. They are translations of international literature, some from authors celebrated in their own countries but unknown to many in the English-speaking world. Broaden your reading and expand your mind! ...more
3.5★ "The schoolmaster was watching the two men climb toward him. One was on horseback, the other on foot. They had not yet tackled the abrupt rise lea3.5★ "The schoolmaster was watching the two men climb toward him. One was on horseback, the other on foot. They had not yet tackled the abrupt rise leading to the schoolhouse built on the hillside. They were toiling onward, making slow progress in the snow, among the stones, on the vast expanse oft he high, deserted plateau. From time to time the horse stumbled."
Algeria, blizzard conditions, so students are all safely at home, and the schoolmaster is snug in his schoolhouse with enough foodstuffs to withstand a siege.
The locals, though, are in such bad shape that he is in charge of doling out wheat supplies that are sent to him for that purpose for the families. Seeing two men approaching - and one on foot - is probably the last thing he expected to be making their way towards him.
The one on horseback is leading a prisoner behind - the unexpected guest. His hands are tied, and his feet are covered only in wool socks and sandals.
I can't say I enjoyed this, but it's short, often discussed, and worth a read if only for that. It will mean more if you know something about the Algerian War of Independence and why the arrested man's fate is a problem for the schoolmaster.
3.5★ “And I like a golem* believed everyone. In the first place, everything is possible, as it is written in the Wisdom of the Fathers. I’ve forgotten j3.5★ “And I like a golem* believed everyone. In the first place, everything is possible, as it is written in the Wisdom of the Fathers. I’ve forgotten just how. Second, I had to believe when the whole town came down on me! If I ever dared to say, ‘Ah, you’ re kidding!’ there was trouble. People got angry. ‘What do you mean! You want to call everyone a liar?’ What was I to do? I believed them, and I hope at least that did them some good. [golem=simpleton]”
Both the author and the translator won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Singer in 1978, and Bellow in 1976. Singer preferred to write in Yiddish and later translated his own work, but this one was translated by Saul Bellow (who was talked into it). But I digress.
It is disguised as a folktale about a simple baker, a man who is easily fooled by outrageous lies and jokes and pranks. I’m sure there are studies and theses written about Gimpel, the woman with the “little brother” whom he is convinced to marry, and the townsfolk, sneering and laughing behind their hands as more children are added to the family.
“I went to the rabbi to get some advice. He said, ‘It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You are not a fool. They are the fools. For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself.’”
I am sure there are theses and dissertations written about various aspects of this story, since it’s a kind of parable. There is a lot of information online. I found it interesting, but not a favourite.
5★ Moscow, April 1919 “Nachman picked up a small pencil and moistened its tip between his lips. His eyes still fixed on his children and grandchildren, 5★ Moscow, April 1919 “Nachman picked up a small pencil and moistened its tip between his lips. His eyes still fixed on his children and grandchildren, he added, ‘Now, I’m going to go around the table. And I want each of you—every one of you, do you hear me?—to give me a destination. I will go and buy steamer tickets for everyone. You must leave the country within the next three months; is that understood? Bella, I’ll begin with you—it’s simple; you’re coming with us. I’ll write it down: Bella, Haifa, Palestine. Ephraïm?’ . . . Before closing the dining room door, Nachman asked them all to think carefully, concluding, ‘You must understand something. One day, they’ll want us all to disappear.’”
More than 90 years later, an anonymous postcard is delivered to a woman in Paris. There is no return address, but there is a roughly written list of four names printed on the back.
“ Then she read the four names, written in the form of a list. Ephraïm Emma Noémie Jacques They were the names of her maternal grandparents, her aunt, and her uncle. All four had been deported two years before she was born. They died in Auschwitz in 1942. And now, sixty-one years later, they had reappeared in our mailbox. It was Monday, January 6, 2003.”
I’m not sure if there’s a genre called fictional biography or not, but that’s what this is. The author is the daughter of the woman who received the postcard, and while she’s curious about it, it’s not until her little girl asks questions many years later that she feels compelled to follow it up.
The family story begins early in the book as historical fiction, which I was surprised to find less engaging than I expected. The family moved several times, trying to stay ahead of the growing hounding and victimisation of Jews, who were considered ‘the other’ or outsiders, no matter where they’d been born or how long they’d lived there.
If a country or politician needed a scapegoat, Jews were handy and accepted by the rest of the general public. Paris became unsafe, but many in the Jewish community hoped the French would stick by them.
It became more interesting to me as the investigation ramped up and the relationship between mother and daughter was featured. Anne has a six-year-old daughter of her own, Clara, whom her mother picks up from school on Mondays so they can spend some time together.
“ ‘Grandma, are you Jewish?’ ‘Yes, I’m Jewish.’ ‘And Grandpa, too?’ ‘No, he isn’t Jewish.’ ‘Oh. Is Maman Jewish?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘So I am, too?’ ‘Yes, you are, too.’ ‘Okay, that’s what I thought.’ ‘Why are you making that face, sweetheart?’ ‘I really don’t like what you just said.’ ‘But why?’ ‘They don’t like Jews very much at school.’ ”
When Lélia calls her daughter later to tell her of the conversation, she struggles to speak. She is a chain-smoker and all of her movements and speech are interrupted and punctuated by lighting of cigarettes, sometimes stalling for time. When she finally manages to tell Anne of Clara’s questions, Anne is beside herself with anxiety.
“From that moment onward, I was on the case. I wanted to find the author of the anonymous postcard my mother had received sixteen years earlier, whatever it took. The idea of finding the culprit became an obsession. I had to understand why that card had been sent.”
Her mother still has the card. Determined to track down the sender and the reason for the card, Anne leads the hunt, beginning with helping her mother unpack and unpick the childhood memories she has hidden from herself. [image] The postcard, front and back
Their detective work is amazing – there is so little to go on. They study every mark on the card, the stamp, the postmark, the shapes of the letters, and they contact everyone they can think of who knew or might have known some member of the Rabinovitch family. They travel in person to visit, to question, to compare Lélia’s memories with what they can see today.
Once I was caught up in the story, I was completely hooked. I really thought they were grasping at straws – and whatever other cliché you can think of about a hopeless cause – but never underestimate the power of women like these or a family like theirs.
If you’re a recently reformed smoker, you may have trouble with Lélia’s non-stop chimney effect and the frequent references to needing to unfug the car when they’re driving. [My word – seemed apt].
Terrific biography and fiction and history that deserves the accolades it’s getting. Thanks to NetGalley and Europa Editions for the copy for review.
3★ “The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years.”
This very short sto3★ “The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years.”
This very short story is actually an excerpt from Kafka’s The Trial, which I haven’t read. This is apparently a parable that I won’t pretend to understand.
The gatekeeper (or doorkeeper, depending on the translation) is preventing the man’s entry into the law. A room? He tells the man he has a lot of power.
“The man from the country had not expected difficulties like this, the law was supposed to be accessible for anyone at any time, he thinks, but now he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, sees his big hooked nose, his long thin tartar-beard, and he decides it’s better to wait until he has permission to enter.”
I think I’d be likely to sit tight and hope for the best as well, but not for “days and years” as the man apparently did. He doesn’t just sit there, though, he is enterprising enough to try to ‘encourage’ (bribe) the gatekeeper, who does seem to take pity on him (but doesn’t budge).
“The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, ‘I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.’ ”
4★ “ ‘Somebody got him to take those drugs, and I know who it was. That’s what I told the police back then.’
Carl pulled out his notebook. ‘Is that righ4★ “ ‘Somebody got him to take those drugs, and I know who it was. That’s what I told the police back then.’
Carl pulled out his notebook. ‘Is that right?’ His inner bloodhound raised its head and sniffed at the wind, catching the scent of something unexpected. He was fully alert now. ‘And who might that be?’
Carl Mørck is an outstanding homicide detective in the Copenhagen Police. We heard his boss tell someone so. Unfortunately, he’s also a nuisance to work with, so when the boss gets a directive to start a new Department Q to investigate cold cases, he knows just the man to put in charge. Carl is getting his own office. It is 2007.
“It was true that a brass plate on the door was engraved with the words ‘Department Q’, but the door itself had been lifted off its hinges and was now leaning against a bunch of hot-water pipes that stretched all the way down the long basement corridor. Ten buckets, half filled and giving off paint fumes, still stood inside the room that was supposed to be his office.”
After twenty-five years with the police, Carl had seen a lot of action and thought he could handle anything. But when he and two of his fellow officers were involved in a shooting that killed one of them and paralysed the other, Carl was shaken. Hardy, an unusually tall man, had been hit and fallen on top of Carl, which completely protected Carl from further shots.
When it was all over, he was questioned about why he remained under Hardy rather than get up and fight back. The reason, of course, was that he couldn’t move, but now, he blames himself for not being able to save his friends. Now he is The Keeper of Lost Causes, in charge of his own department. [The alternative title of the book.]
Chapters move between the current day, 2007, and return to 2001, with background on the missing person, attractive Danish politician Merete Lynggaard. She was a darling of the tabloid press, pretty, popular, and mysterious. Nobody could quite work out what her home life was.
We learn that she lost her parents in a horrific car crash, which also damaged her younger brother, Uffe, so badly that he is mute and badly mentally disturbed. In 2002, she disappeared from the ship that she and Uffe were taking on their annual trip to Berlin. The last anyone noticed her, she and Uffe were standing on deck.
The author tells us early that she is somewhere. This is from the first few paragraphs of the prologue:
“She was going to look after herself. For them she was the woman in the cage, but she was the one who decided how far apart the bars would be. She would think thoughts that opened out on to the world and kept madness at bay. They would never break her.”
Carl spends his time down in Dept Q snoozing with his feet on his desk, forgetting he had asked for an assistant.
“His legs were half asleep as he took them down from the desk and stared at the short, dark man standing in front of him. There was no question that he was older than Carl, or that he hadn’t been recruited from the same peasant kingdom that Carl called home.
‘Assad. OK,’ replied Carl sluggishly. But what the hell did this have to do with him?
‘You are Carl Mørck, as it says outside on the door. I must want to help you, they say. Please, is that correct?’
Carl squinted a bit, weighing all the possible interpretations of what the man had just said. Help him?
‘Yeah, I sure as hell hope so,’ was Carl’s reply.”
Now he will have to get to work. No more snoozing. He and Assad make an interesting odd couple, down in the basement, with Assad finding a small spot for his prayer rug, making exotic teas and foods, and generally confusing Carl, while at the same time asking insightful questions that spark Carl into different lines of inquiry.
I enjoyed the police work and the somewhat touchy relationship between Carl and everyone else, but I found Merete’s chapters very hard.
“She looked towards the glass panes and tried to appear calm. ‘Please, have mercy on me,’ she whispered softly into the darkness.”
It’s a long read. It strayed into the beginnings of side stories that seemed to peter out. Carl is repeatedly told to see a counsellor. He keeps refusing - but finds her sexy. Carl is repeatedly instructed to undertake training for a new title. He refuses each time. He has a stepson and a lodger, who come in and out of several scenes but offer very little to the story. I wondered if these are people who will appear again in the series.
But all in all, I enjoyed it and may follow up with this popular series. ...more
4.5★ “The border between Niger and Libya is known as “the snakebite” because if anything happens to you there, you’re a goner.”
Ousman was a boy when he4.5★ “The border between Niger and Libya is known as “the snakebite” because if anything happens to you there, you’re a goner.”
Ousman was a boy when he left his village to go to the land of the whites. He had no real idea of the perilous conditions he’d find himself in as he wound his way through deserts and over rocky terrain with smugglers who would leave travellers stranded to die. [image] Beginning at home in Ghana, it took him five years to travel north through to and around the top of Libya, then across to Algeria where he zig-zagged around, eventually going by dinghy into the Mediterranean.
This reads like a straight-forward journal, but the circumstances every day range from starvation, privation, occasional work (he was already a bit of an auto mechanic), abuse, and even boredom.
At nine, he was sent to a nearby town to learn a trade. He made friends with an older boy who planned to go to Libya to earn money and come back and marry his girlfriend. Ousman seems to have been a quick learner and a pretty handy mechanic by the time he went to the big port of Accra, where his eyes were opened to the outside world even more.
He had seen an airplane and been told it came from the land of the whites, where people were pilots and doctors. He had also seen movies in the village square once a month, so he and his friends were aware life was different elsewhere. Now he was seeing some of these people for himself.
He’d made friends with the truckers who came through, and one helped him start along his journey north.
“ ‘With expertise and skills like yours, you’ll get a job there, no problem,’ he assured me. ‘They’ll even pay you a decent salary.’”
I won’t attempt to summarise the hell trip across the Sahara, other than to say that of the 46 who were left stranded in the desert by a ‘guide’ to fend for themselves, only 6 survived, and he himself survived only because the 5 others carried him at the end. [image] “When I decided to leave for Europe, I had no idea that I would be traveling for four years, forced to trust my life to a patchwork network of smugglers. The journey led me to the Sahara, where I nearly died.”
I feel that his luck, such as it was, came from his youth and personality, his general helpfulness and talent for fixing things. He managed through many languages without knowing how to read or write. He seems to have been exceptionally resourceful, not to mention resilient.
He did get to Libya, and stayed in Benghazi, for a few years, earning money where he could, and learning what he was up against in his dream to go to Europe.
“Libya is in North Africa, and most people who live there aren’t Black, they’re Arab. . . . That was the first time I understood that there is a thing called “racism.” When I was in Ghana, in Black Africa, there was no racial discrimination . . . We didn’t even know that immigration is considered a problem in Europe. We were under the naïve impression that we would be welcomed with open arms.”
He knew how to hang on to whatever money he earned and spent it well. After leaving Libya, in one instance, he saved himself from an Algerian prison because he’d bought a bus ticket for a guy he befriended whose promise of having the right “connections” proved to be true.
It is all about connections – and money – and gaming the system. It is an industry.
“It’s true, though, that these organizations can acquire whatever documents you need, like a false passport. The different criminal organizations form a chain, and you work your way from one link to the next along your journey. It’s all connected. . . . Algeria receives economic support from France to stop migration, so in each prison, they gave us a different name. That way, they could claim they were detaining many more immigrants than they really were, and get more money. If it weren’t for that, I assume they would have brought us straight to our destination.”
After Algeria, on to Morocco.
“In the no-man’s-land between Algeria and Morocco, hidden from the world, lies the Valley, where the smuggler networks run a sort of autonomous state.”
Then a dinghy, one of two – the other sank and all on board drowned – and Spain. It’s an amazing story, all of it. It was 24 February 2005 when he reached Barcelona, The Promised Land. [image] It would be hard to say No to a smile like this!
He now lives in Europe and has an NGO to make sure the kids in Ghana will have a chance in the ‘real’ world, beyond where he grew up. It looks terrific. You can read a lot of his story there, and donate to the charity, too.
In the afterword, he explains what he was up against.
“They do something in Ghana that, from a European perspective, could seem both peculiar and sad. Students learn how to use computers at school, but without actual computers in the classroom. The teacher draws everything on a chalkboard: the monitor, the icons and menus, the keyboard, the mouse, and so on. They teach Excel by drawing entire spreadsheets by hand. Students have to learn to use computers to pass the university entrance exams, but many Ghanaians won’t use these lessons until they see a computer. Some of them never will.”
And we complain about glitches on smartphones and tablets!...more
PattyMacDotComma
>
Books:
translations
(40)
Loading...
