RE-VISITED (NOT FULLY RE-READ - SEE COMMENTS BELOW) DUE TO ITS LONGLISTING FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE
Fitzcarraldo Editions is an indepenRE-VISITED (NOT FULLY RE-READ - SEE COMMENTS BELOW) DUE TO ITS LONGLISTING FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE
Fitzcarraldo Editions is an independent publisher (their words) specialising in contemporary fiction and long-form essays ….. it focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language . Their novels are (my words) distinctively and beautifully styled, with plain, deep blue covers and a "French-flap" style ....
And that serves as something of an introduction to this novel ........ distinctive, at times beautiful styled, but also very French - a winner of the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious French literary prize - but perhaps a novel less designed obviously appealing to non-French speaking literary tastes (it was shortlisted for but did not win the 2017 Man Booker International Prize).
Ostensibly the set-up of this novel is that it is set over a single night of insomnia, as Franz Ritter (an Austrian Musicologist, suffering from an unnamed, but he believes, serious illness) thinks back on his various travels and researches in the Middle East and in particular his (at least on his side) obsessive relationship with a French academic, Sarah.
In practice this book is more of a Sebald-esque meditation on the Middle East (particularly Syria, Iran and Turkey), on Orientalism, and the relationships and interactions of Westerners (archaeologists, writers, musicians, academics) with that area over the last few centuries.
Sarah’s central thesis (one which explicitly rejects Edward Said’s “Orientalism”) about this relationship is that:
What we regard as Oriental is in fact very often the repetition of a ‘western’ element that itself modifies another previous ‘Oriental’ element, and so on … the Orient and the Occidental never appear separately, they are always intermingled, present in each other and ..these words – Orient, Occidental - have no more heuristic value than the unreachable directions they designate.
The actual conceit of the novel is very weak – Ritter’s feverish thoughts seem to allow him to reproduce details both of his own adventures and (even more unlikely) various historical episodes in encyclopaedic (and often also tedious) delay including with reproductions of articles and documents, which are sometimes excused by Ritter apparently getting up to look at them, but which at other times are unexplained.
At times also the book turns effectively into a non-fictional book or perhaps more of some form of cultural essay or doctoral thesis – and, it has to be said, a poorly organised and at times tedious one. I found at times myself sympathising with Ritter’s own thoughts
What an atrocity to think that some people find dreaming pleasant .... It's so tiresome
And only wishing he would have followed through on an early resolution
I'll try to reduce my thoughts to silence, instead of abandoning myself to memory
However overall, I found that on a first read I was just about able to skim read the more tedious passages and instead join Ritter in abandoning myself to his memory: to the overall impressions he creates both of the cities in which he stays (Damascus, Aleppo, Palmyra, Tehran, Istanbul, Vienna); to the complexities and depths of his relationship with Sarah (an aspect which grows in strength as the book progresses and particularly as we understand the ambiguities of Sarah’s reciprocal feelings).
On a second read - I realised that this is a book to be dipped into, to lose oneself in one of Franz's digressions for 15 minutes just before sleeping makes a wonderful digression ..... but trying to read it conventionally and serially is challenging (despite its conceit of it taking place over a single night). Perhaps in this way the novel mirrors a night of insomnia and fever, drifting between chains of association.
The book increases in power due to its topicality – much of Ritter and Sarah’s early travels are in areas of Syria which Ritter is now aware are at the heart of the Syrian civil war and ISIS’s atrocities and this adds added urgency to the attempts to really understand the Orient.
Sarah talked to me about her thesis ……. , Hedayat, Schwarzenbach, her beloved characters; about those mirrors between East and East that she wanted to break, she said by making the promenade continue. Bring to light the rhizomes of that common construction of modernity. Show that “Orientals” were not excluded from it, but that, quite the contrary, they were often the inspiration behind it, the initiators, the active participants, to show that in the end Said’s theories had become, despite themselves, one of the most subtle instruments of domination there are: the question was not whether Said was right or wrong in his vision of Orientalism; the problem was the breach, the ontological fissure his readers had allowed between a dominating West and a dominated East, a breach that by opening up a well beyond colonial studies, contributed to the realisation of the model it created, that completed a posteriori the scenario of domination which Said’s thinking meant to oppose. Whereas history could be read in an entirely different way, she said, written in an entirely different way, in sharing and continuity. She spoke at length on the postcolonial holy trinity – Said, Bhabha, Spivak; on the question of imperialism, of difference, of the 21st-century, when, facing violence, we needed more than ever to rid ourselves of the absolute otherness of Islam and to admit not only the terrifying violence of colonialism but also all that Europe owed to the Orient – the impossibility of separating from each other, the necessity of changing our perspective. We had to find, she said, beyond the stupid repentance of some or the colonial nostalgia of others, a new vision that includes the other or the self. On both sides.
Overall a flawed novel but an important and, if approached in the correct way, ultimately enjoyable one....more
“The Unseen” is set on one of the thousand .. islands in the archipalego off the coast of Norway, in the first half of the twentieth century before No“The Unseen” is set on one of the thousand .. islands in the archipalego off the coast of Norway, in the first half of the twentieth century before Norway’s discovery of oil means it attains such wealth that it is in the process of going to rack and ruin.
Instead these fishing Islands (seen by Jacobsen as the heart of the Norwegian economy for centuries – and on one of which his mother grew up) remained at mired in extreme poverty and a hand to mouth, subsistence-type existence, eeking out a living from a combination of farming (limited arable and pastoral farming including eider down), local fishing, the foraging of flotsam and jetsam and periods by the men on the Island working for months on fishing fleets. Each island inhabited by one or two families …… who each cultivate a thin layer of earth, fish the depths of the sea and bear children that grow up and cultivate the same plots of land and fish the same depths.
The book is set on the fictional island of Barrøy one kilometre from north to south, and half a kilometre from east to west – inhabited by a single family who take their name from the Island. The family head and Island’s owner is Hans who lives with his strong-willed wife Maria, born on a neighbouring island and (unusually for the area) only daughter Ingrid. The two other inhabitants are Hans’s father Martin (who struggles with the old-age induced loss of his status as head of the Island) and Hans’s simple minded sister Barbro. Hans fishes for several months at the start of each year joining a fishing boat in which he has a formal share of the catch and which he uses to find gradual improvements to the Island – but which leaves the others without him for months.
Then the gravity takes hold of them. Not the gravity of the storm, but the year’s and the island’s slow lessons in loneliness. Suddenly there are fewer of them, they walk around and have lost the head of the Island …. Lofoten is a place you don’t necessarily return from unscathed, you are dicing with death ……. And so the days pass … Until strangely enough, this gravity is illuminated with new hope … they have sent a man on a wing and a prayer into the seething darkness, now they are hoping to get him back alive, perhaps even with his pockets full of money, this after all is what gives the island jope, their head of family has his own fishing gear and a full catch share
For Barbro the only option is service with the slightly better off members of the mainland , something she is very keen on albeit Hans struggles with the way she is treated and keeps removing her from service. Ingrid after some limited schooling also has the same option, although all family members are expected to master different elements of the multiple skills that are needed for the family simply to survive.
The book moves forward gradually from one season to the next and one year to the next, interacting with a small number of relatives and mainland inhabitants (the Pastor, the owner of the trading post, the postmaster) but to an even greater extent with the Island, the sea and most of all the seasons and the weather.
Winter begins with a storm. They call it the First Winter Storm. It is violent every single time and makes its entrance with a vengeance, they have never experienced anything like it, even though it happened last year. This is the origin of the phrase "in living memory", they have simply forgotten how it was, since they have no choice but to ride the storm, the hell on earth, as best they can, and erase it from their memories as soon as possible
In another memorable passage Hans and Martin work on a quay and small landing building, only for a storm (on more than one occasion) to destroy months of their work – something they react to not with anger but stoicism and a simple resolution to try again until they succeed.
The only jarring note in what seems an excellent translation but a prolific translator Don Bartlett (Karl Ove Knausgård, Per Petterson, Lars Saabye Christensen, Jo Nesbø, Jostein Gaarder) is the local dialect “Hva’s th blabben about” “A see hva A ca’ see” “An’ hva ca’ tha see?” which has been rendered into an invented dialect in English, which was awkward to the extent I found myself (very unusually for a novel) wanting to skip the limited dialogue passages.
Overall though an excellent book- deeply evocative of a time and place....more
The book is set in Jerusalem – just over 10 years after the 1948 Arab-Israel war. The key protagonist is a 25 year old socialist student, writing a thThe book is set in Jerusalem – just over 10 years after the 1948 Arab-Israel war. The key protagonist is a 25 year old socialist student, writing a thesis on the Jewish view of Jesus. As the book opens a breakdown in his Socialist group and a series of personal crises cause him to respond to an advert:
Offered to a single humanities student with conversational skills and an interest in history, free accommodation and a modest monthly sum, in return for spending five hours per evening with a seventy-year-old invalid, an educated, widely cultured man. He is able to take care of himself and seeks company, not assistance
As he later explains
I came because my girlfriend left me and married her ex-boyfriend. I came because my father lost a lawsuit and was declared bankrupt and couldn’t afford to pay for me to study anymore. And also because my thesis had been stuck for several months
He finds that the home is occupied by two people – the elderly Gershom Wald and a lady in her 40s Atalia Abranavel. We quickly find that Atalia is the widow of Gershom’s mathematician son, killed in the 1948 war and also the daughter of the late Shealtiel Abranavel who was the lone dissenter from the Zionist Executive Committee and the Council of the Jewish Agency in the post War period who “tried in vain to persuade Ben-Gurion in 1948, that it was still possible to reach an agreement with the Arabs about the departure of the British and and the creation of a single joint condominium of Jews and Arabs, if we only agreed to renounce the idea of a Jewish state” – for which he was condemned and isolated by his Jewish peers as a traitor and also lost his contacts with his Arab friends as the war made such relationships impossible.
Wald was on the other hand an enthusiast for Ben Gurion but the death of his son (and Shealtiel’s son-in-law) overshadowed their differences and the two of them and Atalia live in a state of semi-permanent mourning. After Shealtiel’s death, the mourning of Wald and Atalia increases as does the bitterness between them (Atalia believing her husband’s death due to the militant tendencies of those patriots like Wald) and they resort to hiring graduates to keep Wald company so as to minimise the need for Atalia and he to talk. Atalia seems to enjoy the effect her haunting presence has on the graduates, occasionally deciding to sleep with one of them shortly before dismissing them. Shmuel is no exception to the largely (although not entirely) unrequited passion the graduates form for Atalia, at one point he reflects.
He asked himself what he was doing spending all the winter in this house full of the smell of death, between Abravanel’s ghost and the old man who kept talking like a broken mechanical toy, and the unreachable woman who loathed the entire male sex – even if on occasions her pity could be stirred. And he replied that he was shutting himself away.
He also develops his ideas on the Jews and Jesus with a particular focus on the figure of Judas – developing the theory that far from being a traitor Judas was in fact the only true believer in Jesus among the disciples, and while initially an undercover agent of the religious authorities sent to infiltrate Jesus’s inner circle and check what danger he posed, he ends up deliberately engineering Jesus’s crucifixion in the firm belief that Jesus will perform an incontrovertible miracle by coming down from the cross.
Treachery is the key theme of the book – and in particular how those often accused of treachery are often those who are really the keenest adherents or patriots
Shmuel lists at one point a long list of those considered traitors – his grandfather (who served in the British Mandate police but was actually passing information to the Jewish underground, whose members then murdered him as they thought he might be betraying them in turn, de Gaulle “those who previously enthusiastically supported him [the supporters of French rule in Algeria] now call him a traitor”, Jeremiah “considered a traitor by the Jerusalem rabble and by the royal court”, Abraham Lincoln, the German officers who tried to assassinate Hitler, “Even David Ben-Guiron, when he agreed twelve years ago to the partition of the land into two states” and he reflects “My parents and my sister now accuse me of betraying my family by giving up studying” and concludes
Anyone willing to change will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don’t understand it and loath change. Sheatiel Abravanel had a beautiful dream, and because of his dream some people called him traitor.
Certainly a great novel of ideas and very skilfully written. The book is however not without its flaws – in particular Shmuel’s thesis on Judas is far from original, the relationship between Shmuel and Atalia sits awkwardly alongside the rest of the book and at times the dialogue (particularly when Shmuel is speaking on history or on the Jewish view of Jesus) reads more like a written lecture....more
A mash-up of Silent Spring and the Booker 2016-longlisted The Many combining environmentalism with literary psychological mystery.
The book is effectivA mash-up of Silent Spring and the Booker 2016-longlisted The Many combining environmentalism with literary psychological mystery.
The book is effectively a dialogue between Amanda, a young woman suffering from the effects of some form of toxic poisoning and a young boy David who is sitting beside her bed in a rural hospital clinic (and who tells her she is dying). Most of the dialogue is carried by Amanda, thinking back on what bought her to the hospital, on her relationship with her husband and her daughter Nina as well as with David’s mother Carla, who is a neighbour to a vacation home that the town-dwellers Amanda and Nina rent in the countryside.
David prompts and steers the story seemingly obsessed with Amanda gaining a real understanding of what happened to her and to Nina, but without being willing to reveal it directly. Amanda’s recollections and her dialogue with David are, as the title unsubtlety double signposts, hallucinogenic in nature.
Overall we have the impression that David drank some contaminated water, and that Carla took him to a local healer who saved him by dividing his soul among two bodies (so dissipating the poison’s effect). David thus changed in character – losing some aspects of his own identity to another body (at times it seems Carla is speculating that the body may have been Nina) and gaining strange aspects to his own body including an odd relationship with other, possibly poisoned, animals who he seems to summon shortly before their death. Nina too seems to succumb to some form of poisoning at the same time as David who refuses to reveal her fate to the frantic Amanda.
Clear themes of the book (explicitly acknowledged by the author) include: the longlasting effects of pesticides on animals and humans; the tendency of mothers to be haunted by the “worst case scenario” for their children – Amanda is obsessed with the concept of “rescue distance”, how close she needs to be to her daughter to be able to, if needed, rescue her from harm. The third theme quoted by many readers – transfer of the soul – seems more of a device by which to explore the first two themes and also extend the second into consideration of how a parent can feel alienated from the developing character of their own child.
The book is clearly designed to be unsettling and haunting and is probably best read in a single sitting to really capture that full effect, and to mirror the single continuous dialogue which is the book. However despite reading the book in a City of dubious water quality and when I was away from my children, the book had no immediate (or lasting) impact on me....more
Inexplicably longlisted now for two major translation prizes.
Sonja is over forty, a translator of Swedish crime fiction, unmarried and without childrInexplicably longlisted now for two major translation prizes.
Sonja is over forty, a translator of Swedish crime fiction, unmarried and without children, now physically distant from her country upbringing and her parents, and emotionally distant from her married sister Kate who remains there and has a more conventional lifestyle of husband and children whereas Sonja realises her refusal to conform in her younger life is now affecting her later life.
Kate got everything she wanted Sonja thinks And in the order she wanted it. Kate’s never colored outside the lines
In many ways thinks Sonja Mum did me a diservice in believing I could just be myself. If I hadn’t been allowed to, then I’d be sitting here right now with the whole package, but that train’s left the station. And if anyone does, Mum should know that you have to adapt if you’re going to entangle yourself in an intimate relationship.
Sonja moved to Copenhagen with a childhood friend Molly, but Molly seems to have adopted more to life in the City, Sonja herself now feeling somehow marooned between country and City
“Everything she thought she’d grow into turned out to be as fallibly human as what Molly thought they were getting away from. But the place you come from is a place you can never return to. It no longer exists, Sonja thinks, trying to swallow a lump in her throat, and you your self have become a stranger
Her main interactions are with her part masseuse, part psychologist and two driving instructors.
Nor likes to (in her own words)
write books about middle-aged, childless women on the brink of disappearing—or you could say—on the brink of losing their license to live. If a woman has kids, she will always be a mother, but a woman who has chosen not to procreate and who now no longer is young and sexy is perceived by many as a pointless being.
The intention seems admirable, the execution (at least in this novel) clumsy. I did not feel able to understand Sonja’s character which surely is Nor’s aim.
Instead her struggles to learn to drive seemed to be largely a set of over laboured metaphors: fine with the theory by not the practice; inability to change gears and cession of the control to others; positional vertigo which in turn makes it hard for her to see her own blind spots and to turn around to appreciate the dangers from behind; and her job an excuse for a rather obvious heavy handed dig at Scandinavian Crime noir.
The book provides its own postscript to my review
“Can't you try and translate other authors?" asks Molly. "Some that mean something"
Update: the 2017 Man Booker International Prize winner.
The novel is effectively a single stand-up comedy set by an ageing Israeli comedian (Dov GreenUpdate: the 2017 Man Booker International Prize winner.
The novel is effectively a single stand-up comedy set by an ageing Israeli comedian (Dov Greenstein) to an audience in a small club in a setter-Israeli town, as observed by a district court judge who was asked to the show by Dov who he knew briefly as a teenager.
Over time we understand Dov’s childhood, bullied by his fellow youngsters, the son of a beautiful mother who has been unbalanced by her holocaust traumas and a domineering father who cannot understand and tries to eliminate the eccentricities of the clown-like Dov (who fights bullying by acting as the class jester and clown – even walking on his feet). Ultimately the story he wants to tell is of when he was at a youth military camp (with the judge) but was taken back to Jerusalem to attend a funeral after the shock death of his parent. No one tells the teenage Dov which parent died and he spends the journey (with a joke telling driver) in a state of conscious suspended animation knowing he will lose a parent at the end of it, but also with a sense that he can choose which parent it is.
To his own shock he ends up mentally opting for the survival of his father and when this turns out to be the case is for the rest of his life haunted by his almost murder of his mother.
As the judge observes the show he first of all realises that the last time he saw Dov was when Dov was taken away from the military camp and also comes to terms for the first time with his own recent widower-hood.
The audience to the rambling set alternate between: disgust at some of Dov’s more offensive jokes, subject matters and personal admissions; dumb shock at the way in which he bares his soul and unravels himself before them; an almost pathetic relieved laughter when Dov does actually revert to more conventional humour – almost exclusively by way of well-known routines (for example the swearing parrot traumatised by the fate of the chicken after being shut in the freezer); sheer bafflement as to what they are witnessing; sometimes anger at how far short the routine is falling short of what they justifiably expected.
The reaction of this reader mirrored all of the above. In the stand-up show though almost all the audience leave as the show progresses (other than a small number of people such as the judge who know Dov), something Dov clearly expects and even marks up on a chalkboard as each leaves; however I felt compelled to read the book through to the book’s melancholy ending.
Overall this is a very interesting and original novel, but not as strong as the author’s excellent To the End of the Land....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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