Dad wrote everything again. This time he cut out all the parts he had realized were incomprehensible to their stale minds, and embellished here and
Dad wrote everything again. This time he cut out all the parts he had realized were incomprehensible to their stale minds, and embellished here and there to make it thoroughly believable. This time he wrote nothing about the black snow or my ghost, or Aunt Turan joining the jinns, or Beeta and Issa’s circular flames of love-making. In this new version, there was nothing about Homeyra Khatun’s enchanted garden and well or Effat’s black love, the magical sleep or Razan’s holy fire—all of which I had told him about. He wrote nothing about the prayers of the ancient Zoroastrian priests or the mating of the cows and roosters with wild birds and animals during the time of the black snow. This time he wrote neither that Roza was once able to walk through the air above Naser Khosrow Street with The Wayfarer by Sohrab Sepehri, nor that his brother Khosrow could appear and disappear before everyone’s eyes.
Having been chosen with a group of other Goodreads friends to read “Tyll” as part of the Reading Agency’s shadowing of the 2020 International Booker Prize, I decided to read the rest of the shortlist – something I had previously decided not to do and instead concentrate my reading time (severely hampered by COVID-19) on the Women’s Prize longlist.
This book is written by an Iranian exile who claimed political asylum in Australia around ten years ago. It is officially banned in Iran (although something of an underground bestseller) and has been translated from the Farsi under a nom de plume.
The book is effectively the story of a very prosperous Iranian family of 5, and everything that befalls them for the next decade or so. The family flee Tehran (where their wider family had an enormous mansion) to purchase a large plot of land in a village Razan in the remote countryside (located near an old Zoroastrian fire temple – a tradition the mother of the family still follows). But their attempt to flee the chaos, religious extremism and “arbitrary, revolutionary injustice” that engulfs the capital only succeeds for a period as all of those things catch up with them in Razan (although our narrator Bahar – we find out in the 5th Chapter - died at 13 in February 1979, accidentally burnt to death in a revolutionary attack on their house).
Most of all though I think the book is an examination of how people tell stories to make sense of their lives – particularly at troubled and turbulent times. An examination which draws equally on folk legend, the ancient tradition of Persian storytelling and on more recent classic literature from around the world (interestingly these inspirations – Gabriel Garcia Marquez being the most obvious to an English reader – are very explicitly acknowledged in the text as Behar and her family are both Bibliophiles and lovers of literature – particular literature which tells stories, stories of love and death and families, but literature which draws heavily on imagination). It is easy to describe the book as being of the Magic Realism genre – but it draws on a much wider and much older tradition.
“It’s life’s failure and its deficiencies that make someone a daydreamer. I don’t understand why prophets and philosophers didn’t see the significance in that. I think imagination is at the heart of reality, or at least, is the immediate meaning and interpretation of life.”
The book itself can and should be read like one great story – Bahar narrating the tragic and oftentimes terrible fate of her family, via a route which circles around time: very commonly and deliberately, important portentous incidents and their later near legendary status in the life of the family and the village, their reverberations and impacts are discussed well before we actually know what the incident is. Oddly the effect of this is not disorienting but immersive.
But it also consists of many other stories – few (if any) side characters appear in the book without first telling their story – and sometimes these then lead into nested stories of others they have encountered.
And there is also (and one of my favourite parts of the novel) a deliberately varied and again very explicitly signalled examination of different times of storytelling.
The book opens blackly with the mass state sponsored executions of 1988, of which Bahar’s brother Sohrab was one of the many thousands of victims.
Much of the book is told, as alluded to above, in a rather fantastical, mystical, magic realism style – although even there the styles vary. Some that particularly stand out (and reminded me partly of Marquez but also of Kadare) feature the Ayatollah Khomeini and a fantastical and (I think for the author and her characters) redemptive telling of the events before his death, and the way in which he is literally haunted by his victims.
Others though are more standard magic realism fare crossed with Persian myth. Some of these sections to be honest are (like much magic realism) a little tedious – sometimes when the normal rules of fidelity to natural laws and order are abandoned, the storyteller (and novelist voicing them) has a lot more fun than the reader – and during 2-3 lengthy chapters in the middle of the book (while vital to a key early incident in the novel involving fire and fate, and to the eventual fate of Bahar’s sister Beeta) I found myself skipping large sections as well as cringing at two sex scenes.
But there is much more and its in the exceptions and juxtapositions that the real interest of the book lies.
When early on in the novel I read this passage
Briefly Hossein explained that seven years ago people had taken to the streets, chanted death to the Shah and death to America. So, the Shah and his family had fled Iran, His Holiness Ayatollah al-Azmi Imam Ruhollah al-Musavi al-Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in France, the Holy Islamic Republic replaced the tyrannical Pahlavi regime, nighty-eight percent of the people voted for the Islamic Republic of Iran, the leaders of the previous regime were executed, and any remaining opponents of the Islamic Republic were opponents of the Islamic Republic were arrested and sent to prison. Ayatollah Khomeini ordered that housing, water, and electricity would be free for the average Iranian, women had to wear a headscarf, and the Great Leader of the Revolution had ordered all relations with America and all other bourgeois countries cut off. Hossein declared that Iraq had invaded Iran and now all men, young and old, and even children, were on the front fighting to preserve the Holy Islamic State.
I marked it down as representing an understandable (but disappointing) example of using reported narrative to sketch historical background – but as the book developed and I revisited it I saw it as one of the types of stories examined and more so a type which while very common to educated Westerners (and prosperous Iranian City dwellers), is in fact an alien tradition to the villagers and drawing on concepts that are as imaginary and other-worldly to them as ghosts and Djinn’s to us:
In the midst of all of this, just once did one old man ask, “Where is Iraq, anyway? And who is America?”
Later one man, sitting with a group of river ghosts (as well as the long dead Bahar and Beeta - newly saved from a suicide attempt), tries for the first time to tell his story, having previously not known how to tell it. Encouraged he launches into a nearly 8 page and highly convoluted single sentence, very different from the more carefully crafted stories of the others, after which:
The middle-aged man blushed in embarrassment and asked, “I’m sorry, is this how people tell stories?” The old man answered, “Yes, this is one way people do it.”
When Beeta returns from a lengthy time in Tehran, leaving with the innocent face of an anguished girl, returning with “the expression of a stalwart woman, with several gray hairs, a few wrinkles”, she also has “lips that were accustomed to silence” and the biggest sign of her change and the ordeal she has undergone is her unwillingness to tell the kind of lengthy and convoluted story which the family are used to:
Moreover, her account of the events of the last several years was so succinct we didn’t dare ask more. She seemed to have become inexplicably accustomed to keeping silent. I didn’t blame her. When she described how she had joined the first student dissent group upon enrolling at the university as a student of art history, and was arrested at a student protest, banned from studying, and then sent to prison, we realized that life still had yet grimmer things in store for the members of our family. It had taken her less than an hour to recount everything from start to finish;
Two of the most chilling and effective parts of the book are towards the end when the worlds of legend and magic clash terribly with the harshness of modern Iran (and its regime).
The first is when the Father is being tortured after being mistakenly seized at a demonstration as a Shah-sympathiser (perhaps not an unreasonable accusation given the family’s pre-revoutionary wealth and apparent disdain for the people of the City). His confession/family story (effectively his account of the very story we are reading) is rejected for being too fantastical for the elements in the opening quote to my review (which serve as a good summary of the story). Instead he rewrites it to what for the “stale minds” of the authorities is a far more rational explanation but which to him, to our narrator, to (I think from interviews) our author and by this stage of the book us as reader comes across as an unimaginative and frankly inaccurate account of what has actually befallen the family:
Instead, he wrote that he had been completely opposed to the political system prior to his arrest, that Beeta had lost her sanity and now believed she had been transformed into a mermaid and was in a psychiatric ward; and that his wife, Roza, had Alzheimer’s disease and had gone missing. He wrote that I had died in a fire Revolutionaries had lit in our house and they hadn’t seen my body since. He wrote many things. Things that were partly his own dreams. He wrote that for years he suffered from depression and was house-bound until, one day, he set off and travelled through most of the country, teaching and procuring illicit political books for young people. He wrote that he was neither a monarchist nor a communist nor a Mojahedin; that he just wanted democracy and believed that people had the right to choose their religion, dress, and political parties, and that the media should be free. He wrote that he had no living family members and the story of his brother, Khosrow, had merely been a figment of this imagination; and that he had never had a sister by the name of Turan.
And Beeta’s actual transformation to a mermaid (one laced with allusions to legend and literature) and her escape to the sea gives rise to the most disturbing scene of the book as when landing back on water, she is seized by the men who see her, subject to attempted but anatomically impossible rape and then assaulted and shot.
Overall this is a very powerful novel and would I think make a deserved winner of the prize – I have to say it was a lot more enjoyable to reflect on and to write about than it always was to read (I would give the concept 5* and the reading experience 3*)....more
I nod and think about the teacher who said I’d go far with my empathy and boundless imagination, but
Winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize.
I nod and think about the teacher who said I’d go far with my empathy and boundless imagination, but in time I’d have to find words for it because otherwise everything and everybody stays inside you. And one day, just like the black stockings which my classmates sometimes tease me about wearing because we’re Reformists – even though I never wear black stockings – I will crumple in on myself until I can only see darkness, eternal darkness.
Having been chosen with a group of other Goodreads friends to read “Tyll” as part of the Reading Agency’s shadowing of the 2020 International Booker Prize, I decided to read the rest of the shortlist – something I had previously decided not to do and instead concentrate my reading time (severely hampered by COVID-19) on the Women’s Prize longlist.
I had some concerns about this book before I began given: one of the same friends had abandoned it; another marked it as “difficult to enjoy … gratuitous … an exercise in breaking as many taboo’s as possible”
Barry Pierce in the Irish Times describing it as part of a trend of novels that “focus on .. grotesque characters written almost grotesquely”, a genre he describes as “abject fiction” with as its “ur text” Eileen Mosfegh’s “Eileen” – possibly in view the most execrable book ever to be longlisted for the Booker (albeit as much due to the ridiculous plot as the scatological writing). It is a genre which I seem to strongly dislike and avoid on Philippians 4:8 grounds; although genetically I seem pre-disposed towards it (my clone being a particular fan of Patti Yumi Cottrell, a persistent practitioner - and of this book).
The story of this autobiographically influenced book is simple.
Jas, is a 10 year old girl, living with her two brothers, sister and strict Dutch Reformed parents on a dairy farm in late 2000 through to 2001. The book opens immediately with tragedy – her brother Matthies drowns after falling through the ice in a long distance skating race (the author’s own brother dying when the author was 3)– and the book examines the fall out of this tragic event on the family, functioning as an examination of dysfunctional grief.
Jas blames herself for the death – having struck a bargain with God to save her pet rabbit (which she was convinced was being fattened up ready for Christmas). Her mother reverts to a form of eating disorder – repeatedly cutting out elements of her diet in a form of self-purging/fasting. Her father sinks even further than ever into anger and silence, something provoked still further by the destruction of his dairy herd after Foot and Mouth sweeps from the UK across Holland. And the children descend into experimenting with a mix of self-harm, animal abuse and sexual exploration.
The imagery in the book is strong – Jas drawing strongly on his farm experience to try (and normally fail) to make sense of the world around him.
The sight of his brother’s dead body is
“Matthies’s face was as pale as fennel”
As he struggles with his inner demons:
“There weren’t any words to take the edge off fear, the way the blades of the combine decapitated the rapeseed plants to keep only the bit you can use.”
Or as he makes sense of how his non-communicative parents could have got together, while also ruminating (an excellent choice of words by me!) on what he understands of sex via what he sees on the farm:
It’s still a mystery how our parents found each other. The thing is, Dad’s hopeless at looking. When he’s lost something it’s usually in his pocket, and when he goes to do the shopping he always comes back with something different than what was on the list: Mum’s the wrong kind of yoghurt, but one he was happy enough with and vice versa. They’ve never told us about how they met – Mum never thinks it a good time. There are rarely any good times here, and if we have them we only realize afterwards. My suspicion is that it was exactly like with the cows, that one day Granny and Grandpa opened my mum’s bedroom door and put Dad in with her like a bull. After that they shut the door and hey presto: there we were. From that day on, Dad called her ‘wife’ and Mum called him ‘husband’. On good days ‘little man’ and ‘little woman’, which I found strange, as though they were worried they’d forget each other’s sex, or that they belonged to each other.
But these excerpts are some of the few highlights. Increasingly though she draws heavily on the dark side of what sees around him in nature and in farming – her language increasingly filled with imagery of decay, blight, excrement, the mould on the left-over bakery items his father buys, rotting vegetables
When we arrived at the mangels, some of them were rotten. The mushy white pulp that looked like pus stuck to my fingers when I picked them up.
And to be honest, as so often with this genre, the sheer repetitiveness of the gross imagery turns what could be shocking into something increasingly tedious. The writers in this genre have never subscribed to the “less is more” theory of writing.
The writing becomes very predictable and easy to satire – early in my reading of the book I posted on a discussion forum
The book is growing on me like the mould on the rancid dead hamster festering in my brother’s bed, mould that reminds me of the patches my mother scrapes off our buns in turn uncovering the currants that remind me of sores on the pestilential back of our sow. As my father quotes from Leviticus “a persistent defiling mould; the novel is unclean”
Only to find to my amusement that a decaying hamster and currants (in this case like drowning beetles) featured later in the book.
The other part of my spoof quote was Biblical, Jas has been thoroughly immersed in the Bible and as any discussion in his family dries up, it’s the language of the Bible that he repeatedly reaches to.
I’ve got so many words but it’s as if fewer and fewer come out of me, while the biblical vocabulary in my head is pretty much bursting at the seams.
I found this a much more successful piece of writing by the author (themselves with a strong religious background) – the high point being this excellent analogy:
Suddenly I realize what’s going on. Everything from the recent past falls into place, all the times we were fragile, and I say, ‘This is another of the plagues from Exodus, it must be. Only they’re coming to us in the wrong order. Do you understand?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, you had a nosebleed which meant water changed into blood. We’ve had the toad migration, head lice at school, the death of the firstborn, horseflies around the muck-heap, a grasshopper squashed by Obbe’s boot, ulcers on my tongue from the fried egg, and hailstorms.’ ‘And you think that’s why there’s a cattle plague now?’ Hanna asks with a shocked expression. She’s laid her hand on her heart, exactly above the Barbie’s ears, as though she’s not allowed to hear what we’re discussing. I nod slowly. After this, there’s one more to come, I think to myself, and that’s the worst one: darkness, total darkness, daytime eternally clad in Dad’s Sunday overcoat.
Unfortunately, the book then descends further into gratuitousness and repetitiveness – but this time its in the narrative action rather than the analogies. The (as described earlier) self-harm, animal abuse and sexual exploration is described in rather sickening detail – in a manner which I felt added little to the book and subtracted much from any ability to appreciate it.
The practitioners of this genre also do not subscribe to the “show not tell” theory of writing.
When they do, I think the book is more convincing – no more so than in the powerful ending. There are a few other areas of the book which I find less convincing.
The first is fidelity to the set-up: a book set in 2000-01 has a narrator whose brother listens to an album from 2003 and how herself anticipates the 2006 demotion of Pluto as a planet, while also seeming to change age from 10 to 12 in only a few months (skipping 11 altogether).
More generally I did not find the age of the narrator convincing. Most attempts at writing children seem to me to over-estimate the maturity of the children; this book seems the opposite – Jas I find reads more like an 8-year-old than 10-12 year old, for example when (at least) 12:
I’d nervously shaken my head: once Mum was behind the glass of the TV set, we’d never get her back, or maybe only in pixels when the screen was snowy, and what would become of Dad then?
But maybe this is simply a narrator on the cusp of adolescence and caught between adult experimentation and childlike fears – and lacking supportive and loving parents to allow her to navigate this transition against a background of grieving.
The most touching part of the book speaks to this:
Promise me this will stay between us, dear toads, but sometimes I wish I had different parents. Do you understand that?’ I continue. ‘Parents like Belle’s who are as soft as shortbread just out of the oven and give her lots of cuddles when she’s sad, frightened or even very happy. Parents that chase away all the ghosts from under your bed, from inside your head, and run through a summary of the week with you every weekend like Dieuwertje Blok does on TV, so you don’t forget everything you achieved that week, all the things you tripped up on before scrabbling to your feet again. Parents that see you when you’re talking to them – even though I find it terrifying to look people in the eye, as though other people’s eyeballs are two lovely marbles you can continuously win or lose. Belle’s parents go on exotic holidays and make tea for her when she comes home from school. They’ve got hundreds of different sorts including aniseed and fennel, my favourite tea. Sometimes they drink it sitting on the floor because that’s more comfortable than sitting in a chair. And they horse around with each other without it turning into fighting. And they say sorry as often as they’re nasty to each other.
While most of the imagery is drawn from the bible or the farm around her, I was not sure if this quote was a failure of writing (unpleasant imagery drawn from outside those two areas) or bad translation of locusts:
When Mum and Dad rescued the beans they had just frozen, they lay wet and floppy on the kitchen table. The little green bodies looked dismal, like an exterminated plague of bush crickets.
One thing that is interesting about this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist is that (unlike some years where my impression is books are picked which were relatively obscure even in their homeland) they have picked a number of books which were very popular in their original language – this book for example (translated by Michele Hutchinson) selling 50,000+ copies despite its incredibly challenging style.
I wonder how many of the 50,000 copies were actually quietly put away well before being finished – this is a book which despite its merits I would find impossible to recommend.
If you read it you may also quietly decide to abandon part way through.
Lots of people want to run away, but the ones who really do rarely announce it beforehand: they just go.
Having been chosen with a group of other Goodreads friends to read “Tyll” as part of the Reading AgencyShortlisted for the 2020 International Booker.
Having been chosen with a group of other Goodreads friends to read “Tyll” as part of the Reading Agency’s shadowing of the 2020 International Booker Prize, I decided to read the rest of the shortlist – something I had previously decided not to do and instead concentrate my reading time (severely hampered by COVID-19) on the Women’s Prize longlist.
This rather gentle book - despite its misleading dystopian billing - makes one on level a marked and welcome contrast to the transgressive violence of “Hurricane Season” (which unfortunately shades into gratuitousness by the end) and to “The Discomfort of the Evening” (which, like most of the genre to which it belongs, at times tries too hard to be shocking and tips over into laughable). But at the same time I felt the book also lacked the strongest aspect of those two books - their drive and urgency.
Occasionally the premise of the book - the disappearing objects works really well. I thought the most powerful example was when R’s (*) wife gives birth to their son and supplies him (via a dead letter drop) with a drawing. First of all because this idea, of a pencil picture of a new born, jars with the reader and then as R reflects on the disappearance of photographs and what they represent, again sparking some faint resonance with the narrator.
"Of course photographs have already disappeared he murmured. "Photographs?" I said, not understanding what he meant. Then, after repeating the word to myself, I finally realized I had a vague memory that there had once been smooth pieces of paper that captured someone's image
Another strong moment is when (in a scene which seems a rather pale version of Fahrenheit 451) the narrator watches a thrown book and is suddenly reminded of the image of a bird - an image which was meaningful to her via her father’s interest in birds, but which should have disappeared from her memory. This scene showing to me a kind of flickering Proustian resistance to the Memory Police's erasure of memory.
I followed the arc of the last book as it tumbled through the air - and suddenly I realized that, long ago, I had stood at this same window with my father and looked out at a similar sight. I took a deep breath and felt a slight pain, as though a spark had found its way into the bottomless swamp of my heart. "A bird". I remembered. The pages of the book had opened and fluttered through the air just the way birds had once spread their wings and flown off to distant places. But this memory, too, was, soon erased by the flames, leaving behind nothing but the burning night
Neither though is applied consistently.
The old man is constantly discussing his boat -how he has no memories of it and cannot recall the job he used to do - but seems to do this by listing the things he has forgotten and the tasks he no longer does ("I lost the fun of getting my hands oily tinkering with the engine").
And for me the bird imagery idea could have given rise to a wonderful Oulipian constraint - the author via the voice and imagination of the narrator, successively dropping metaphors/similes/imagery as the objects which inspire them are disappeared - but with some fading Proustain echoes. Admittedly the author/translator do avoid any inconsistency here - but this is due to (at least in translation) using language which is very straightforward, almost pedestrian. And some of the rare similes used jar - at one stage in the interleaved short story, as the captor sits opposite the typist instructing her to eat, we are told He has the mannerisms of a waiter in a fancy restaurant.
I enjoyed the secret writing theme which connects the inspiration for the novel (Anne Frank’s diary), the author’s own debut novel (which her husband only found out about when she won a prize) and this novel’s protagonist (and her continuation of the story of the typist - a typist who, in what I think is a clever juxtaposition, loses first the one thing the inhabitants of the Island retain - their voices).
I also really liked the idea of the mother’s sculptures and the role they have - representing I think the way in which art can act as a memorial for societal culture, a repository for preserving what is and was important to people.
Overall a stronger book than the another I have read by the author (the rather simplistic "The Professor and the Housekeeper"), but one that feels like it could have been so much better.
3.5*
(*) and in a book which is I think is far less topical than implied (and which in contrast to other reviews I think shows every sign of having been written in its original language years previously) having R as a key character in the novel is an inadvertent masterstoke and gives rise to some lines which are very apposite for our times as the protection of R (even his being carefully kept at a lower level) becomes paramount to the hope that normal society may one day resume.
Clean and disinfect everything; hygiene will be more important since no doctor can come to take care of us if R falls ill
Learn more about R: from now on, he won't have contact with anyone except the two of us...more
Now shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
Now shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief. Frank Kafka
I was lead to the above quote from an interview between the author of this book and her translator Sophie Hughes – the author saying “That’s why I wanted to make an experience of Hurricane Season. It seemed to me that the only possible way to communicate this particular story, even if that meant grabbing the reader by the throat and roughing her up a little. But then that’s exactly the kind of books I like, the ones that are like a natural disasters, the ones Kafka said were like axes for the frozen sea within us”.
Having been chosen with a group of other Goodreads friends to read “Tyll” as part of the Reading Agency’s shadowing of the 2020 International Booker Prize, I decided to read the rest of the shortlist – something I had previously decided not to do and instead concentrate my reading time (severely hampered by COVID-19) on the Women’s Prize longlist.
The reading of this book was particularly appropriate as I read it in the second half of May:
- Two weeks after the time of the year when the main events of the book are set (in early May);
- Two weeks before the start of the Atlantic Hurricane Season (which gives the book its name – see below – and whose fallout – like many natural and man-made disasters - occupies a large chunk of my working life)
- And in a week which I should, except for the Coronavirus, have spent working in Mexico – visiting Mexico City and Monterrey.
This book is set in a very different Mexico to that which I visit – both socially/economically and geographically. This book is set in the vicinity of a lightly fictionalised Gulf Coast Veracruz, in a town wracked by poverty, corruption and crime and misogynistic/homophobic language and violence. The book is not so much set in that society but infused with it – particularly with the language and violence and that makes the book an extremely uncomfortable read – a book that (picking up on Kafka’s quote) wounds and stabs the reader’s sensibilities.
And it is a book which has its origins (appropriately) in a natural disaster – landslides following a 1978 Hurricane (a fictionalised mash up I think of the timing of Tropical Storm Bess and the impact of Hurricane Earl, which would have impacted the author’s place of birth exactly as she was writing the book). These landslides cause the death of the town’s witch leaving her child orphaned.
And the remainder of the book traces the origins of a man-made disaster – the discovery of the murder of that child (now themselves known as The Witch), tracing it by way of a series of lengthy chapters: the first of which traces the story of The Witch, and the remainder those caught up in her murder starting with Yesenia (who sees her hated, drug-addled cousin Luismi and another local waster carrying the Witch’s body into a truck driven by Munra, a crippled drunkard, married to Luismi’s prostitute birth-mother). The other chapters are narrated by: Munra; Norma an under-age girl who takes refuge with Luismi after prolonged sexual abuse from her own stepfather leads to her falling pregnant (with the narration also hijacked by Luismi’s mother Chabela); the second waster – Brando.
The chapters are written in a breathless style – each a single paragraph, relentless both in their repetition and forwards momentum and in their uncompromising and language and description. With the exception of the Brando chapter, which I felt tipped too much into gratuitousness and rather marred the overall experience of the book, I overall felt that the propulsive way in which the author wrote overcame the repulsive manner of the actual words and subject matter, so that against my better judgement I was drawn into and through the story to emerge as though from a disaster – feeling fortunate mainly to have survived and roughed up by what I had read....more
I was delighted with a group of Goodreads friends to be selected by the Reading Agency to read this book as part of their shadowing of the InternationI was delighted with a group of Goodreads friends to be selected by the Reading Agency to read this book as part of their shadowing of the International Booker Shortlist. We will meet in June as a group to discuss the book.
Overall this in my view by far the most enjoyable on the shortlist, but not without its flaws.
It reminded me a lot of Neal Stephenson's wonderful Baroque Trilogy - a lot more focused and tightly written than Stephenson, but lacking Stephenson's sheer imagination and hugely deficient compared to Stephenson's ability to synthesise historic ideas and the way in which they birthed our current world in areas like money, politics, IT.
See here for a great write up of that trilogy which also refers to the Winter Queen (and her seminal role there).
- Elizabeth and Frederick's first night together (including the petals)
- Wolkenstein's account of his own travels - the real version and the told version (contrasted at length through the whole chapter of his trip to the Battle of Zusmarshausen)
- Elizabeth and Frederick on why he took the throne (this is one with genuine historical resonance)
- Nele and Tyll on who killed the Pirmin (or - a third alternative - was this assisted suicide)
- Through torture Tyll’s father changes his own account and convinces himself he is guilty
- Equivocation (the Porter scene in Macbeth inspired by Tesimond)
Grandchildren and Great-Grandchildren: and the stories you tell them
- Martha knows she will tell her grandchildren about Tyll (but she never has them)
- Nela precisely does not tell her grandchildren about knowing and travelling with Tyll
- Wolkenstein tells Elizabeth he will in future tell his grandchildren that he met the Winter Queen
- Wolkenstein does not say the same to (or of) Tyll - although they meet
- Wolkenstein when writing his account 50 years later falsely dramatizes his story to include a child-eating wolf as he is influenced by now having grandchildren
Alternative lives (including involving marriage to a different person)
- Martha wanting to stay in the village, be married and so not fleeing with Tyll - but this future never happening as a result of her choice (after the village is raided)
- Claus contemplating the alternatives of being hung or attempting a magical escape, fleeing and starting anew - and deciding it's a lot simpler to be hung
- Tyll not wanting to be a farmhand and so fleeing his village
- Nele not wanting to marry a Steger son and so fleeing with Tyll
- Tyll and Nele abandoning Gottfried for Pirmin
- Nele not marrying Tyll
- Nele choosing to take the offer of marriage and leave Tyll
- Elizabeth remembering how during the Gunpowder Plot, she fled London (fearing her father dead) to get away from conspirators searching for her to put her on the throne as a puppet Catholic ruler (something she found quite attractive!)
- Elizabeth thinking of her father's plans for her to marry Gustav Adolf (who later humiliates Frederick)
- Elizabeth imagining her older son becoming King at the request of the Parliamentary Party (in fact we know he ends up falling out with the family after - to his and their shock - Elizaebth's brother is executed)
- The Thumbling marrying princess in the story told by Nele as queried by Tyll
- And of course the whole book is a deliberate reworking of Charles de Coster’s ‘The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak” and of Thyl’s relationship there with Nele.
- Romeo and Juliet (part of Tyll's play in the first chapter and what causes Elizabeth to take Tyll as her fool)
- Macbeth (her father's remarks to Shakespeare on the untested unity of England and Scotland and his fear of witches; Shakespeare's later presentation of the pray - one Elizabeth thought the best she had seen but one she had never seen again, the direct link of Tesimond to the play via the Porter/equivocator scene - https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/th...)
- The Tempest (Elizabeth reflects she would never show the same mercy to Wallerstein as Propsero did to his enemies). And of course in the play she watches Shakespeare himself plays the part.
- Hamlet (Elizabeth proud of the way she offers comfort to Shakespeare on the death of Hamnet - a lovely link to a Women's Prize shortlisted book)
Development of German Art
Elizabeth has scathing views on German literature, plays and poetry - partly written tongue in cheek by the author and partly a genuine exploration of its infancy at the time of this book compared to the way in which English art was developing.
Martin Opitz - Elizabeth tries him and finds him unreadable, she later discusses with Wolkenstein and both laugh at the idea of reading him. Wolkenstein sets out his aim to write his life story in German, later we find he does and relies (to describe a battle scene he no longer knows how to describe on an account by another author - Grimmelshausen (see below) - who in turn took his description of a battle he had actually witnessed from a book by an English author who had never seen a battle - translated by, as it happens, Opitz). Note from Peter Wilson's "Europe's Tragedy" (see below) I discovered that the inspiration for Grimmelshausen was Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia" - written in 1590 but the 1630s or so German language version of which was edited, indeed, by Opitz.
Paul Fleming - he inspires Wolkenstein (although noted as now dead) - earlier we see him meeting Tyll (and Nele) as part of the dragon chase: before which he discusses his poetry (and writing of it with German) with (a rather baffled at his langague choice) Kircher and Olearius (who reflects that whereas Fleming's poems will soon cease, Kircher's writing will be read for ever)
The book refers to Grimmelshausen’s “The Adventures of Simplicus Simplicussimus” - seen by the Romantics as the first authentic German novel, used by them for their reinterpretation of the conflict (source for both: Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Year’s War” by Peter Wilson” and itself a kind of story of a rogue living through the Thirty Year’s War (so similar in concept to “Tyll”. See also above.
Music - Kircher's role in music is rather downplayed (and only really covered in the context of his - in modern terms) bizarre dragon quest: but his Musurgia Universalis (which is mentioned in the book) was actually what lead to his indirect immortality as it inspired Bach, Beethoven and Handel.
Links to other books
Adam Olearius is described as (and historically was) a mathematician and a geographer. Is this a nod to “Measuring the World” which of course was about two characters: a Geographer and a Mathematician.
Missing children
- Price Rupert: As an English reader its disappointing that one of the most fascinating characters of the Civil War/Inter-regnum/Restoration years is not (as far as I can tell) mentioned in the book at all. I kept hoping to spot him but unlike his two older brothers he does not make it. And this character is relevant to the story - Frederick's naming of his son (born just after the fateful decision to accept the Bohemian Crown which dominates the book) after the only emperor of the Palatine dynasty, was as a crucial sign of his dynastic ambition.
- Sophie of Hannover: And perhaps even more disappointing to see no mention of Rupert's sister - her name still fundamental to our entire Hereditary system via the Act of Succession.
WEAKNESSES
- Historical research appears sketchy/superficial - based on rather clichéd and out of date understanding (infant mortality meant low parent-child attachment, people were drunk much of the time). This is not the same as saying that the book is historically inaccurate - the very act of taking Tyll from previous centuries (and the concentration on unreliable narration of historical events as set out above) make it clear that historical veracity is not the author's aim (in fact quite the opposite). However the author has in interviews made it clear that he was trying to convey thematical aspects of 17th Century mid-Europe as a key part of the novel - and this is where I find the book a little disappointing.
- (In complete contrast to Stephenson) his ability to draw lessons for today's world seems faulty. When he originally conceived the book it was to contrast with a world where disease was feared and science mistrusted (in contrast to the modern world) - the contrast seems a little lower now. Also he is on record as saying that when Trump was elected part way through writing Tyll he was shocked: however I think he had failed to see that (a) in a democracy, voters are always prone to voting jester-style populists into power, especially when all parties had converged on a type socially liberal, economically free-market politics run by identikit professional politicians and (b) that in a world where 24/7 news and social media means anyone can play the role of the fool puncturing pretension - that the only politicians likely to succeed are those whose persona makes them effectively impervious to satire/accusations of hypocrisy (and who in fact turn those attacks into an insult to their followers).
Similarly I think he has failed to see how irrationality in people and leaders has reappeared in our world (no longer dragons causing plague but 5G towers, a "King" who proclaims that the plague will simply miraculously disappear). Of course the reader can draw these parallels for themselves but in interviews the author makes it clear he is exploring a world very different to our own. And even if you accepted that - it is an extremely Western-European centric view....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
>
Books:
2020-int-booker-shortlist
(6)
Loading...
