122nd book of 2023. And this handily doubles up as #2 in my challenge with Alan: read something published before 1800.
Historia regum Britanniae / De 122nd book of 2023. And this handily doubles up as #2 in my challenge with Alan: read something published before 1800.
Historia regum Britanniae / De gestis Britonum / The History of the Kings of Britain is a text written in the 12th century about the creation of Britain and some of our first kings. It was, somehow, considered historical until well into the 16th century. This is strange because within the pages you can find giants, dragons, magicians (notably, of course, Merlin), King Arthur and his magically empowered sword Caliburn, created on the ethereal island of Avalon and King Lear (spelt Leir), the basis of Shakespeare's later play.
The book itself feels like some weird postmodern game: Monmouth claims that Walter the Archdeacon presented him with 'a certain very ancient book written in the British language', which Monmouth then translated into Latin. Monmouth, in the chapter about King Arthur, mentions Walter again, saying he heard about the battle of Camlann from him, a man who was 'most learned in all branches of history.' So whether Walter truly gave Monmouth a physical book, or whether he had simply told him stories which Monmouth decided to write down, is unknown.
I'm embarking on a chunk of research regarding Arthurian myth and legends, so this was my first foray into it. Most Arthurian myth was invented at a later date, by the French, so here King Arthur is less a theological/spiritual tale and quest but rather a man spun to be a true historical King of Britain. Despite his semi-magical sword, Monmouth describes Arthur as being a strong, passionate and skilled leader. It reaches into the hyperbolic often: at one point, Arthur charges into battle with Caliburn and calling upon the 'Blessed Virgin', kills 'four hundred and seventy men'.
The familiar love triangle with Arthur and Lancelot had yet been invented, but Monmouth does relay, in brief, Arthur's nephew Mordred, crowning himself in Britain whilst Arthur is away and living adulterous with his wife, Guinevere. Humorously, this is written, 'About this particular matter, most noble Duke, Geoffrey of Monmouth prefers to say nothing.' He knows his limits. I was hoping to learn a little about the mythical place of Avalon, but Monmouth only mentions it once in saying that Arthur was wounded and retreated there to rest/heal.
As for Merlin, he spouts a lot of prophecies, tells a king about two dragons and steals the rocks that would later become Stonehenge from Ireland where they were placed by giants. In keeping with a lot of British history, Utherpendragon goes and slaughters the Irish who wanted to keep their rocks, and steals them. Later, Uther is buried at their site near Salisbury.
Next up is the French texts that takes these stories and creates them into spiritual fables and romances. And lots of poetry....more
Well Scott felt like rational reading before journeying to Scotland in a few weeks, but what a disappointment. I always imagined h116th book of 2023.
Well Scott felt like rational reading before journeying to Scotland in a few weeks, but what a disappointment. I always imagined him in the adventure leagues with Dumas, Stevenson, etc., and though I'm not generally a fan of mindless swashbuckling fun, I wanted at least a bit of fun. Sadly, Rob Roy follows whiny Francis Osbaldistone talking his way through 400 pages of novel before we get a taste of anything remotely close to action. The book's namesake is wasted and collectively appears in less than about 30 pages of the book. I guess the main thing is the bad marketing of the book: it's no an adventure story at all. Scott's writing was dialogue-heavy and rarely interested, either. There were some nice descriptions of the Scottish landscape, but only briefly. A shame. I'm just hoping Ivanhoe has some more kick to it, when I finally get to it. ...more
Eco makes it very clear that two writers greatly influenced The Name of the Rose: Arthur Conan Doyle and Jorge Luis Borges. Our me111th book of 2023.
Eco makes it very clear that two writers greatly influenced The Name of the Rose: Arthur Conan Doyle and Jorge Luis Borges. Our meek Austrian narrator’s master is an Englishman, William of Baskerville, and at the abbey is a blind monk named Jorge of Burgos. The Name of the Rose is one of the bestselling novels of all time, selling over 50 million copies. I suppose the whole murder-mystery aspect carries that as opposed to the long theological digressions, symbolism, history and philosophy that is struck through the book. I always imagined it would be a slow and dense read but I actually found it incredibly breezy; Eco’s prose is light and the plot moves with good (and clearly very orchestrated) momentum. After a long religious monologue from a monk or an argument about whether Christ ever laughed, the reader is rewarded with another murder scene. I guessed who the murderer was quite quickly, or at least had a good inkling, but it didn’t feel like a letdown. For a murder mystery, it almost felt like the murderer’s identity wasn’t the ‘point’ of the novel. I’ll say no more so the intrigue, mirrors, old texts and riddles are kept intelligently dormant.
The most rewarding passages were about the library and books in general. (Eco himself apparently owned some 50,000 books).
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realised that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
So postmodern, meta, readable. For a debut novel, it’s immensely impressive. I own a few Eco novels in my (comparably) pitiful personal library of some 800 books. I was lucky enough to read this between a library (my workplace) and the nearly one-thousand year old cathedral opposite.
I will say one final thing in favour of this novel, it’s, at times, surprisingly funny. Adso (our narrator) reads about love sickness and worries about it in monk-like fashion. Eco, being Italian, makes some humorous observations through Adso about William of Baskerville and his Englishness.
In my country, when you joke you say something and then you laugh very noisily, so everyone shares in the joke. But William laughed only when he said serious things, and remained very serious when he was presumably joking.
I read this to my colleagues at work, one of whom laughed and made a sly remark about Italians, and then, face falling, said he didn’t see much stock in what he said. We were always smiling. ...more
1st book of 2023. Artist for this review is Italian sculptor Michelangelo (1475-1564), of course.
3.5. A short novella that riffs off historical fact.1st book of 2023. Artist for this review is Italian sculptor Michelangelo (1475-1564), of course.
3.5. A short novella that riffs off historical fact. It surrounds Michelangelo in 1506 Constantinople attempting to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. Young Michelangelo insists he is not qualified, but he is employed anyway. Leonardo da Vinci has already failed before him, his plans being rejected. I am impressed that Énard decided to write about Michelangelo at this point in his life rather than his time in the Sistine Chapel.
[image] The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I had the pleasure of looking up at this ceiling on my second visit to Rome (I never got a chance to enter the Vatican on my first visit), but photographs are not permitted to be taken inside, so this is not my own picture.
The chapters are short, sometimes abstract. Énard's prose is light and impressive. I know his other novels are longer so I'm keen to read those. The blurb of this book claims that this novella is about art, why bridges are built, about seeing art from two sides, etc., and I think a lot of these supposed themes are mostly invented for a nice sounding blurb. The end of the novella contains a surprising and dramatic event which I sceptically presume falls into the fictitious. I'm a huge art lover though and reading a book about Michelangelo just interested me. If you do not like art, maybe this book would be boring but thankfully short. Extra points for having one of the coolest titles I've seen in a while.
I thought I'd give Ernaux a read post-Nobel win, as I read her Getting Lost pre-Nobel and wasn't hugely impressed. The Years is of115th book of 2022.
I thought I'd give Ernaux a read post-Nobel win, as I read her Getting Lost pre-Nobel and wasn't hugely impressed. The Years is often considered her masterpiece. I think reading a memoirist is different to reading fiction writers in that you need to build a connection with them before you begin to read about their lives and their feelings, in the same way a novel prepares us for caring about the characters involved by allowing us to get to know them. In Getting Lost I was thrown into Ernaux's diaries from a period in which she was having an affair and found it, mostly, uninspiring and boring. In a similar fashion, I felt the same emotions beginning this book.
The Years is a slippery book, a term I decided I wanted to use in my review about half way through and was surprised to read, in the last few pages, Ernaux call the book, herself, slippery. It's like the memoir version of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire"*. Beginning in the 1940s and running into the 21st century, Ernaux creates a portrait of France, partly the whole world. It's hugely impersonal which, in turn, creates the personal. The book riffs off photographs, beginning with the personal and then expanding to world movements, famous deaths, technology. In some places the book begins to feel a little list-like, which is where I started to grow tired of reading it. The back half of the novel saved any boredom though, as Ernaux begins to dissect why she wanted to write it and what her purpose was, in the same way Mallo does at the end of his Nocilla Trilogy.
She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation. Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas, and manners, and the private life of this woman? How to make the fresco of forty-five years coincide with the search for a self outside of History, the self of suspended moments transformed into the poems she wrote at twenty ('Solitude', etc.)? Her main concern is the choice between 'I' and 'she'. There is something too permanent about 'I', something shrunken and stifling, whereas 'she' is too exterior and remote. The image she has of her book in its nonexistent form, of the impression it should leave, is the one she retained from 'Gone With the Wind', read at the age of twelve, and later from 'Remembrance of Things Past', and more recently from 'Life and Fate': an image of light and shadow streaming over faces. But she hasn't yet discovered how to do this. She awaits if not a revelation then a sign, a coincidence, like the madeleine dipped in tea for Marcel Proust.
So this can act as a sort of blurb and the answer to all her questions is reading the book itself. So 5-stars for Ernaux's vision, some 3-star feelings for some of her prose in the beginning, before the novel gathers its momentum, some 4-stars for bits in the middle. A real mix. I'm going to have to read it unrated. Ernaux interests me though, and I'm pleased, all things considered, that she won the Nobel for what she's doing with the form. Anyone playing with the form is to be respected. The image of her burying her cat whilst simultaneously, in her mind, burying everyone she has ever lost, will stick with me. There's a lot in this book about things repeating themselves, time happening at the same time, always, as Einstein said, that the past, present and future are all an illusion. ____________________________
*Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye" Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock" Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai" Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, mafia Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land" Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion "Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say? We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan "Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law Rock and roller, cola wars, I can't take it anymore We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire But when we are gone It will still burn on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it We didn't start the fire It was always burning, since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it...more
I'm leaving this unrated because it's such a difficult thing to pin down. I picked Voetmann up for my flight to Copenhagen, being a102nd book of 2022.
I'm leaving this unrated because it's such a difficult thing to pin down. I picked Voetmann up for my flight to Copenhagen, being a contemporary Danish writer, and read bits and pieces of him throughout my stay and now back here in England, too. The title presumably comes from this quote from Naturalis Historia, 'I am adding hours to my life: for living only means to be awake.'
The book is a combination of quotes from the aforementioned text by Pliny the Elder and fictional scenes, monologues, etc., from the writer himself and Pliny the Younger. It's a fairly abstract book. Having some knowledge of ancient Rome would probably help, luckily I studied it for two years and have an interest in the era, and many of the names were familiar (though I never studied Pliny). Pliny the Elder famously died after rushing towards the erupting Mount Vesuvius and becoming ash. His life's work, working on the Naturalis Historia (an attempt to catalogue the whole world) was passed onto his nephew. The book is called a 'comic delight': I don't see that, though I did find many parts fascinating and somewhat playful. The scene that sticks with me the most is Pliny the Elder taking a woman to his bedroom, a woman with no orifices. The man who sells her for the evening to him tells him not to attempt to create any holes in her by cutting her. So, Pliny rubs his genitals all over her hole-less body, feeling more aroused than he has ever felt. Something about the unattainable.
Calasso is an Italian writer I've managed to avoid for some time despite owning his two major works, The Marriage of Cadmus and Har59th book of 2022.
Calasso is an Italian writer I've managed to avoid for some time despite owning his two major works, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Ka. Instead of reading those first, as I planned, I have NetGalley to thank for sending me an advance copy of a 'new'* Calasso book, which is going to be published in late July. This one is under 150 pages long but deals with myth as his other major works do. The whole book is a dialogue between Sinbad the Sailor and Utnapishtim on the island of Dilmun. The latter disobeyed the gods and was banished to the island, and his punishment, rather than death, was eternal life. That was several thousand years before Sinbad arrives, and Utnapishtim finally has someone to talk to. And talk he does.
The mythology in the book was almost entirely unknown to me, mostly around Ea, the Sumerian god of water, creation and knowledge. His son features. As does the construction of Babylon, the Anunnaki in general, and Gilgamesh. Utnapishtim's monologue tells a number of old myths in a very simple style over the course of ten small chapters. Sinbad occasionally interrupts or has something to say himself, but a majority of the text is Utnapishtim's own monologue. Below are some examples of the prose and some of the highlights/interesting ideas from the book. Starting with the description of the Underworld from Utnapishtim.
"More than Babylon or Eridu, it was the Underworld that was the Great City. Walking through it, one came across one palace after another. Some said: 'This is Nergal's palace, this is Ereshkigal's.' But there were others, too, palaces of minor gods, Hushbisha, Dimpimeku, Ninazimue. There were temples, too, and towers. Darkness was constant, except when Utu, the Sun, made a brief visit to pass judgement. The inhabitants wandered in the dust, dressed in feathers down to their feet, like birds that cannot fly. They ate clay."
[image] One interesting idea was Utnapishtim describing how once all humans spoke the same language, but 'understood one another too much. There were endless fallings out. Even more dangerous though, where the moments when they reached a sudden agreement.' So, Ea 'multiplied the tongues of men',
"At first bewilderment and confusion ran riot. Then people began to split up and withdraw into different regions, well protected from one another. A dim veil came down on each of these places. But the veil could be torn open by curiosity and study."
But the gods were not sure if they were '"more or less happy than before"', "'They kept their eyes mainly on whatever was close to them, wanting to possess it forever."' The price tag seems a little steep for such a short book but I recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading about myths, these are not the sorts of stories you read often. I had certainly never read about Utnapishtim and Ea and all the Anunnaki. _____________________
*Calasso died just last year. So far I haven't found any information about when he wrote this book. Update: looks like it was originally published in 2020, though I'm not sure if it was written as late as that, or dug up from Calasso's older work....more
4.5. A real masterful piece of work this is. Sublime, stunning, and so intelligent. It's a shame this is his only book translated i16th book of 2022.
4.5. A real masterful piece of work this is. Sublime, stunning, and so intelligent. It's a shame this is his only book translated into English, he's brilliant (and looks almost too cool to be a writer [1]). The book is comprised of five parts which in a way read like separate pieces. The first, "Prussian Blue" is the most interesting piece of writing I've read in a long time, all circling the creation and use of cyanide. The next three parts ("Schwarzschild's Singularity", "The Heart of the Heart" and the titular "When We Cease to Understand the World") are about numerous mathematicians and scientists from Einstein, Schrödinger, Schwarzschild, and others. The final part, "The Night Gardener", of the novel suddenly shifts, a very short auto-fiction chapter, of just 10 or so pages, about Labatut's hometown in Chile. This, as all other chapters do, links back into the narrative, about madness, cyanide, war and genius. This honestly is one of the most fascinating and impressive books I've read recently.
"Prussian Blue" blew me away, in 24 pages. It opens with the medical examination of Hermann Göring on the eve of the Nuremburg Trials, describing his fingers and toes stained a 'furious red'. Labatut then describes the Pervitin that all of the Wehrmacht were borderline addicted to, receiving it in their rations, so that the troopers 'used to stay awake for weeks on end, fighting in a deranged state, alternating between manic furore and nightmarish stupor'. He then reports that in April 1945 alone 'three thousand eight hundred people killed themselves in Berlin', and talks of the suicides that rocked Germany rather than facing their defeat. We then read about Hitler's beloved German shepherd, Blondi, who was given cyanide first on Hitler's orders because he was 'so convinced that his dosage had been tampered with'. Next we hear about the Indian goldsmith, M.P. Prasad, who is the only person to write about cyanide's flavour, writing three lines before he died. The liquid form smells slightly of almonds, 'which not everyone can distinguish as doing so requires a gene absent in forty per cent of humanity', and Labatut comments, that a significant number of Jews murdered in the concentration camps would smell nothing at all as the cyanide filled the gas chambers, 'while others died smelling the same fragrance inhaled by the men who had organised their extermination as they bit down on their suicide capsules.' Then suddenly we zoom out, and Labatut explains that certain bricks in Auschwitz were stained a 'beautiful blue', this is because of 'cyanide's authentic origins as a by-product isolated in 1782 from the first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian Blue.' Thus begins the history of the colour and its creation, which later oscillates into describing silkworms (for those who have read Sebald, how Sebald [2]) and the Nazis planting millions of mulberry trees, into a short biography of Johann Conrad Dippel, who, without, Prussian Blue would never have existed, into, then, Carl Wilhelm Sheele, who first realised the danger when he 'stirred a pot of Prussian Blue with a spoon coated in traces of sulphuric acid and created the most potent poison of the modern era'. This moves into another colour, a green, which Napaloeon loved, so Labatut's narrative takes us there to the Emperor and his bedroom, and his final days where his skin took on a 'cadaverous grey tone', and then we follow the narrative onto Rasputin and the failure to kill him, then onto Alan Turing, and Labatut describes what he was like as a man, and how he died by cyanide, which then leads us to reading about the children during the war and their gas masks, then into Ypres, where the 'first gas attack in history overwhelmed the French troops', and Labatut quotes a first-hand account of the gas and its effects which killed everything, all men, horses, birds in the trees, insects, mice, everything came from their holes to die, which leads us to Fritz Haber, who first obtained nitrogen 'from the air', as before, Labatut tells us, Englishmen would 'despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried', and how they did the same, unearthing bodies from the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, which then gets us to Adi, or Adolf Hitler, with a two page biography on how we went from aspiring artist to hateful war survivor, and finally the chapter ends with Haber's death and the letter written to his wife. This is 24 pages, the first part of the novel.
And though Labatut says in the Acknowledgements that the 'quantity of fiction grows throughout the book' because "Prussian Blue" contains 'only one fictional paragraph' (he doesn't say which), it's clear that the man knows his science and his scientists. I didn't understand much of the quantum mechanics and whatever else but what prevailed wasn't the science at all, it was the genius and the madness. All the scientists in this book go pretty much 'insane' at certain points in their life, with recurring near-starvation and sleep deprivation (mostly due to obsessiveness of work), self-exile, talking to themselves, not washing, shaving, the usual. They were tormented souls and Labatut gives us full portraits of all of their madness (and genius). Somehow they all link too, scientists appearing in one another's chapters, ideas strung together ('standing on the shoulders of giants' . . .), and themes recurring and recurring. Of course as well as the madness and the genius, Labatut shows us that above all, maths and science are the most dangerous things to humanity; and, did these great men foresee that their inventions and ideas would be used for mass destruction, genocide? So it's also a reflection on the cost of genius.
How the novel is only 188 pages is utterly beyond me. I'll say again, masterful.
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[1] [image]
[2] The Rings of Saturn is placed comfortably within the acknowledgements....more
Another ancient text down as I persist in reading the older works from world literature and philosophy. This one was surprisingly r124th book of 2021.
Another ancient text down as I persist in reading the older works from world literature and philosophy. This one was surprisingly readable and enjoyable, whether that's down to the translation or not, I don't know. The work isn't too long so I'll definitely be reading it again from other translators and getting a broader image of the original (as possible as that is with translations). The dialogue, not unlike some sort of Socratic dialogue, is between Krishna and Prince Arjuna. The latter is worried about going into battle and fighting his own kin, and turns to the former for advice. What's interesting is that it starts with the idea of war (what is it good for?) and then moves into life itself, tackling many philosophical questions. The Bhagavad Gita is an important Hindu text that was originally written in Sanskrit. It inspired many writers, as my blurb says, such as Isherwood, Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Gandhi, Oppenheimer, et al. It is riddled with underlinable pages, things like,
'Value knowledge over practice, meditation over knowledge; highest is renunciation, whence comes, immediately, peace.'
A worldly source of knowledge, and within you can see so many other philosophies and religious teachings, that goodness and virtue will prevail and those who practice it will reap its rewards someday. ...more
72nd book of 2021. No artist for this review, instead pictures used from the text itself.
4.5. (Dropped to 4 when comparing to Sebald's novels.) As I'v72nd book of 2021. No artist for this review, instead pictures used from the text itself.
4.5. (Dropped to 4 when comparing to Sebald's novels.) As I've read all of Sebald's novels (and consider him one of my all-time favourite writers and inspirations), I'm now pushing into his other areas of written work: poetry and essays. A Place in the Country is comprised of six essays on various writers and finally an artist: Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, Robert Walser, and Jan Peter Tripp. Sebald states in his Foreword,
And so it is a reader, first and foremost, that I wish to pay tribute to these colleagues who have gone before me, in the form of these extended marginal notes and glosses, which do not otherwise have any particular claim to make.
He touches on the important thing about these essays right here: like his fiction, these essays are multifaceted looks at their subjects, including snatches of the autobiographical from Sebald, biographies of the subjects, from general musings, appreciations, less literary criticism and more literary (and personal) appreciation. And he ends his Foreword by saying, with all the beauty that Sebald says almost anything:
I have learned how it is essential to gaze far beneath the surface, that art is nothing without patient handiwork, and that there are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection of things.
[image]
Despite being only really familiar with Rosseau, the essays were illuminating for me. Rosseau's essay is, too, perhaps, the most realised of the collection. I may believe this because it is the heaviest with Sebald's own presence. It opens as such.
At the end of September 1965, having moved to the French-speaking part of Switzerland to continue my studies, a few days before the beginning of the semester I took a trip to the nearby Seeland, where, starting from Ins, I climbed up the so-called Schattenrain. It was a hazy sort of day, and I remember how, on reaching the edge of the small wood covering the slope, I paused to look back down at the path I had come by, at the plain stretching away to the north criss-crossed by the straight lines of canals, with the hills shrouded in mist beyond; and how, when I emerged once more into the fields above the village of Lüscherz, I saw spread out below me the Lac de Bienne, and sat there for an hour or more lost in thought at the sight, resolving that at the earliest opportunity I would cross over to the island in the lake which, on that autumn day, was flooded with a trembling pale light. As so often happens in life, however, it took another thirty-one years before this plan could be realized and I was finally able, in the early summer of 1996, in the company of an exceedingly obliging host who lived high above the steep shores of the lake and who habitually wore a kind of captain's cap, smoked Indian bidis and seldom spoke, to make the journey across the lake from the city of Bienne to the island of Saint-Pierre, formed during the last ice age by the retreating Rhône glacier into the shape of a whale's back—or so it is generally said.
(And as we discuss Sebald discussing other writers let us take a moment to discuss Sebald himself here. This paragraph is comprised of just three Sebaldian sentences of great length and grace; his prose is effortless, wandering, that builds itself, ripple-by-ripple, until its conclusion breaks and washes us down. Even here in his essays, he presents himself as a master of prose.)
And before he discusses Rosseau's work he describes the room he took: The room I took at the hotel looked out on the south side of the building, directly adjacent to the two rooms which Jean-Jacques Rosseau occupied when, in September 1765, exactly 200 years before my first sight of the island from the top of the Schattenrain, he found refuge here...; and Sebald once again expresses, firmly but subtly, a general contempt for the modern world he inhabits,
At any rate, in the few days I spent on the island—during which time I passed not a few hours sitting by the window in the Rosseau room—among the tourists who come over to the island on a day trip for a stroll or a bite to eat, only two strayed into this room with its sparse furnishings—a settee, a bed, a table and a chair—and even those two, evidently disappointed at how little there was to see, soon left again. Not one of them bent down to look at the glass display case to try to decipher Rosseau's handwriting, nor noticed the way that the bleached deal floorboards, almost two feet wide, are so worn down in the middle of the room as to form a shallow depression, nor that in places the knots in the wood protrude by almost an inch. No one ran a hand over the stone basin worn smooth by age in the antechamber, or noticed the smell of soot which still lingers in the fireplace, nor paused to look out the window with its view across the orchard and a meadow to the island's southern shore.
S. once told me that he had begun writing a biography on the writer A.E. Coppard (whom he oddly resembles in certain photographs, though was surprised to find people telling him this); he told me of the stories he had found throughout his research, playing cricket with Robert Graves, or breaking into Yeats' garden. The project soured though, he told me, because the family were very protective of Coppard's image and had previously attacked earlier attempts at rooting about in his life. Though I expressed disappointment, and was disappointed to see his evident excitement extinguished, he told me that visiting those places that Coppard had been had instilled in him a strange feeling. He told me not to underestimate the power of place, and the place where those that have inspired us have been. "Literary journeys", he called them, and urged me there and then to take as many as I can. I believe, he said to me, that there is a certain power there, somehow, left by them, which can find its way into us.
[image]
And so it's no surprise that in a similar vein Sebald writes,
For me, though, as I sat in Rosseau's room, it was as if I had been transported back to an earlier age, an illusion I could indulge in all the more readily inasmuch as the island still retained that same quality of silence, undisturbed by even the most distant sound of a motor vehicle, as was still to be found everywhere in the world a century or two ago.
The essays retain some of the sadness always found in Sebald's prose. Some of his subjects, such as Mörike make for sad subjects.
And so we see Mörike at the last sitting in the garden surrounded by his wife's relations on a hot summer's day, the only one with a book in his hand, and in the end not very content in his role as a poet, from which he—unlike his clerical calling—can no longer retire. Still he has to torment himself with his novel and other such literary matters. But for years now the work has not really been going anywhere. The painter Friedrich Pecht, in a reminiscence about this time, relates how on several occasions he observed Mörike noting things down which came into his head on speecial scraps and pieces of paper, only soon afterwards to take these notes and 'tear them up into little pieces and bury them in the pockets of his dressing-gown.'
Keller is another beautiful, sad and slightly disturbing essay. There are images imbedded in the text of his incessant writing of a woman's name, plagued by unrequited love, Betty Betty Betty, BBettytybetti, bettibettibetti, Bettybittebetti [Bettypleasebetti] is scrawled and doodled there in every calligraphic permutation imaginable. It is reminiscent of the moment Humbert Humbert asks the finder of his notebook to repeat the name Lolita for the entire page.
The Robert Walser is perhaps the best essay in the collection along with Rosseau. In it, Sebald draws comparisons between Walser and Sebald's own grandfather, of dates that seem to correspond within their lives, of other strange affinities. (On all these paths Walser has been my constant companion. I only need to look up for a moment in my daily work to see him standing somewhere a little apart, the unmistakable figure of the solitary walker just pausing to take in the surroundings.)
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This is not simply literary criticism but the understanding of the strange ways that writers, for sometimes reasons outside of our understanding, haunt us. Walser is there haunting Sebald as Nabokov haunts each of the four parts in his novel The Emigrants. It makes me wonder if there is a thread that could be found between all writers, haunting one another in some way. I remember reading recently about Kawabata's suicide (or not suicide, no one knows) following Yukio Mishima's death; and how, Kawabata, apparently, according to his biographer, had recurring nightmares about him, for two or three hundred nights in a row, and was "incessantly haunted by the specter of Mishima". This collection of essays is really a reflection on the spectres in Sebald's life. And in turn he has become a spectre in my own....more
127th book of 2021. All pictures in the review are from Vol.co.
Firstly, I gotta say I'm a big Tokarczuk fan and respect her as much (or more) after r127th book of 2021. All pictures in the review are from Vol.co.
Firstly, I gotta say I'm a big Tokarczuk fan and respect her as much (or more) after reading this beast. This beast is too long and I've got my problems with it, but what a novel to have written. Spanning the 18th century, and beyond, and the historical figure Jacob Frank, a man believed to be the Messiah. Though the novel is certainly centred around him, Jacob floats in and out of the narrative (in fact, he doesn't actually appear in the narrative for the first 200 or so pages) and instead we get a sweeping 'panorama of an almost neglected chapter in European history', as said by the Nobel Committee. The novel crosses several borderlines and characters, including the most interesting character, Yente, Tokarczuk's 'fourth-person narrator', the woman who cannot die and instead flies about the novel's events as an omnipresent 'eye'.
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There are pictures interspersed through the novel as her Flights was, there are letters, and diaries too. It is a sometimes overwhelming experience reading the novel, being physically larger than paperback size and big-enough-to-wrestle in length. Its most overwhelming feature is down to its first flaw. The Books of Jacob is readable enough, Tokarczuk doesn't bog it down with historical exposition or long religious ideas, but she does tell the novel in a very detached and unemotional way. For mostly 900-odd pages the tone of the novel stays the same, there's no rise or fall, nothing: it is like one very long road which is oftentimes interesting and oftentimes simply exhausting. Did it need to be so long? I'd say No. If it were shorter it would probably be a better novel. There are so many characters, so many plots, we hear about what they are doing, thinking, moving around, marrying, it is a constant barrage of stuff, fictional or not. And when it comes to wondering what is historical truth in the novel and what isn't, Tokarczuk answers that herself in a way. When a character asks another character to write a novel about the Frankists and how it was, he asks, ''But how were things? Is there anybody still around who could tell me?'' and the friend answers, ''You're a writer, just make up whatever's missing.''
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Tokarczuk certainly does that with the depth of the novel and the characters like Yente. For those daunted by the size, it is wonderfully readable, almost simple in prose. There are moments of beauty but I would say it is almost entirely character-driven. This is ironic as Jacob Frank is unlikeable at almost every point. Fans of Tokarczuk should read it simply because it is hailed as her magnum opus and maybe it is. It's ambitious and ambitious writing always gains my respect whether I like it or not. It is a portrait into an interesting part of the world for me, an interesting time period, and focused on men accused of being Jews, but then becoming Muslims, but then being taken into the Catholic faith. If you like big books on history and religion then really look no further. Otherwise, it depends how much time you have and how much you like Olga. I'll add more thoughts when they are better organised but for now I can say it was a good experience but I'm glad it's over and back on the bookcase smiling the 'I've been read'-smile. ...more
I've been teaching Wing Tsun (or Chun) Kung Fu for five years now, and training it for many more. As with all Kung Fu, it originate165th book of 2020.
I've been teaching Wing Tsun (or Chun) Kung Fu for five years now, and training it for many more. As with all Kung Fu, it originated in China, where Sun Tzu, two-thousand years ago, was writing The Art of War. I found this very interesting, and very familiar with what I learn in Kung Fu, and what I teach. I'll expand mostly on Sun Tzu, hopefully.
As with most self-defence martial arts, or at least, Kung Fu, the main goal of a fight is not to have the fight at all. Despite being called The Art of War, Sun Tzu has written the exact same thing: avoid the fight if you can. I teach children all the way through to adults, but the first things you start drilling into their minds, and continue for their whole training-life is avoid the fight. The last resort is to fight. If they want your phone or your money or anything, you give it to them. Nothing material is worth the cost of your life. Or, before running, try to talk your way out of it, or as Sun Tzu says, To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence.
Within Kung Fu and Sun Tzu, there are certain things to understand and gauge. Fighting more than one person (or being outnumbered by a larger army) is usually the time to run and avoid the fight. Grade 8 of the student grades in my system is multiple assailants: number 1 rule? You guessed it. Run. Failing that, you have your Kung Fu; there are a number of ways to defend yourself. Sun Tzu gives a number of ways to deal with combat, too. It would be a pretty terrible Art of War if it didn't. Interesting that he calls it the "art" of war, as Kung Fu is a martial "art"—implying there is an art to it, whatever that may be. In the first chapter Sun Tzu claims that, All warfare is based on deception. I can’t make all comparisons between Tzu’s comments and Kung Fu because warfare, on a scale as grand as armies colliding is not the same as two men scrapping in the street. War, on the former scale, is the long game; the fight in the street is instant—there are no spies, no tactics: it is frenzied and clumsy. Sun Tzu briefly outlines the art of using offensive strategies:
When ten to the enemy’s one, surround him. When five times his strength, attack him. If double his strength, divide him. If equally matched, you may engage him with some good plan. If weaker numerically, be capable of withdrawing. And if in all respects unequal, be capable of eluding him, for a small force is but booty for one more powerful if it fights recklessly.
As a comparison, these are the four principles of Wing Tsun Kung Fu:
1. If the way is clear forge ahead! 2. If there is contact keep glued to it! 3. If your opponent is stronger, give in! 4. If the opponent retreats, follow!
Number 3 is less literal: the concept of “giving in” is more yielding to pressure while remaining in the fight. Once the fight has started, the concept of then fleeing is almost entirely gone. If you have committed to fighting, or they have attacked you, your only goal becomes ending the fight as soon as possible. This is where number 4 is involved; as soon as the enemy is on the backfoot, relating to number 1, you “follow”, you “forge ahead”. But, these are only applied when the fight has started. To return to Sun Tzu: He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.
There are many elements of Kung Fu that I will omit to save this review being too long, boring and didactic. There is a nice quote by Tzu, When torrential water tosses boulders, it is because of its momentum; when the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey, it is because of the timing, which sounds very Kung Fu-like, but even more so, how familiar is this?
Now, an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army should avoid strength and strike weakness. And as water shapes its flow in accordance with the ground, so an army manages its victory in accordance with the situation of the enemy. And as water has no constant form, there are in warfare no constant conditions.
Or, as Bruce Lee put it, “Be like water.” Bruce Lee trained Wing Tsun Kung Fu under Grandmaster Ip Man—so here we have full circle.
To finish I want to use my favourite quote from The Art of War.
Now, the troops of those adept in war are used like the “simultaneously responding snake” of Mount Ch’ang. When struck on the head, its tail attacks; when struck on the tail, its head attacks; when struck in the centre, both head and tail attack.
In Kung Fu we have similar ideas: “Everything that goes up, must come down”, we train our arms to be “springy”, so we bounce back from pressure given. When we “yield”, we are only moving, or displacing their force, like a matador leaping aside for a bull to pass. Or, as my Si-Fu puts it, when they are all engine and horsepower, we are the clutch.
So, with my personal interests in Chinese martial arts, I found this book very useful. I’ve heard its used for all sorts now, including business. Ironically, again, my Si-Fu is looking for us to branch out our scope and go into offices and use Kung Fu principles and ideas for the workplace, much in the same way as The Art of War. What I’ve learnt then? War, fighting, is more about just hurting someone, protecting yourself, or winning a battle. It is something within us that we can access, something that makes us stronger, and wiser....more
This book stings like the cold. In fact, the cover of my edition is what it feels like; I can feel that ice in the pit of my stomac139th book of 2020.
This book stings like the cold. In fact, the cover of my edition is what it feels like; I can feel that ice in the pit of my stomach after reading some of the descriptions here... Descriptions that Wiesel writes almost flippantly. I will be quoting some, and they are not pleasant to read: you are warned.
Wiesel was just a boy when he was sent to Auschwitz. It's hard to imagine that his entire experience is captured in 115 pages. It wasn't always that way - his first manuscript was 900 pages long; that has been distilled to this. The writing is hard to describe: sparse? Deft? Minimalist? Wiesel put it quite well when Orson Welles expressed interest in turning it into a movie: Wiesel believed that a movie would fail because it would be made without the silences between his words. Most of the book he is with his father. When the camp is liberated in 1945, Wiesel is 16 years old.
Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes...children thrown into the flames. (Is it a wonder that ever since then, sleep tends to elude me?)
He said about his book, "In Night, I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night." In just 115 pages he manages to begin with his life before, briefly, the creation of the ghettos, the arriving at Auschwitz, his time there, his own feelings and there is quite the discussion into the "death of God" through his eyes, as he suggests in the above quote. Though for a time Wiesel toys with the idea of God and providence.
I had new shoes myself. But as they were covered with a thick coat of mud, they had not been noticed. I thanked God, in an improvised prayer, for having created mud in His infinite and wondrous universe.
The language is deceptively simple. There is a certain silence to it, as he comments on too. He uses many ellipses throughout the book, which I don't tend to like in books, but they work here. The reason the language is so empty at times is what makes it echo so hauntingly.
Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing... And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Elie Wiesel received a Nobel Peace Prize in his life. He died in 2016. Utah senator Orrin Hatch said this, "With Elie's passing, we have lost a beacon of humanity and hope. We have lost a hero of human rights and a luminary of Holocaust literature." A luminary is a beautiful choice of words. We can hope with literature like Wiesel's and Primo Levi's, we can continue to learn about the Holocaust to ensure that it never happens again. However, in 2018, two years after Wiesel's death, antisemitic graffiti was found on the house he was born in. So, we ask ourselves, what have we truly learnt since 1945?...more
Sebald traverses no land known to us. The names are familiar (Vienna, Venice, Verona…) but he is, in actuality, traversing his own 93rd book of 2020.
Sebald traverses no land known to us. The names are familiar (Vienna, Venice, Verona…) but he is, in actuality, traversing his own mental landscape. We glimpse into it, the thin thread that weaves, not only across Europe, but his mind. Thoughts and images which appear to have no correlation begin to connect. A sense of order can be seen through chaos. Through reading we begin to also question what the blurb questions: What could possibly connect Stendhal’s unrequited love, the artistry of Pisanello, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, a missing passport, Casanova, the suicide of a dinner companion, stale apple cake, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka about a doomed huntsman and a closed-down pizzeria in Verona?
We are led, by a firm, but frail hand through four parts: “Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet,” “All’estero,” “Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva,” and “Il ritorno in patria.” The first, Stendhal’s hurting heart. The second, a European romp, Kafkaesque, frightening, cities that remind one of The Unconsoled; the third part gives us Kafka’s disatisifaction and finally, our narrator returning to his hometown of W. – reminiscent of another European narrator remembering Combray…
Above all, we are connected to this story, which is connected to itself, by a feeling of vertigo. A word which gives us the lurch, the plummeting of one’s stomach, but also fear. Waking on the edge of the bed, falling through the ether of sleep, with the bedsheets scrunched in our fists. But Sebald’s mental landscape also allows us to traverse our own, to consider the bizarre connections in our life. The album Noonday Dream (which conjures its own images too: the fortress in Nazarére, Marlboro cigarettes, tired seascapes...) reminds me of the meandering roads from Château-Verdun to Lagrasse, a journey that has faded to just the rushing of poplar trees from the car windows, the fields of rape seeds, the mountains. And once in Lagrasse, the square in the centre of the commune, where one finds shade, a woman selling pottery – water jugs patterned with flowers, birds in flight – and where, my mind’s eye placed the man and his cat from Camus’ The Plague. My father and I watched the water, we spoke about living there, writing, drinking wine and eating figs. Sebald’s narrator believes he is being followed in “All’estero,” his passport is misplaced, he asks the parents of two boys if they would send photographs of them to his home after their holiday for he is baffled by their resemblance to Franz Kafka, but they presume him a kind of paedophile, and he retreats. The image of these Kafka boys become the true Kafka, feeling ill, depressed; where at times, he sits like a ghost at table, suffers bouts of claustrophobia, and imagines that every fleeting glance sees right through him.
[image] L'Orbieu River, Lagrasse - Photo by Me.
It rains here today as it has rained many times before, in many different towns. My mind has not settled since finishing Sebald. I am thinking again about vertigo; it is not the sense of falling, not exactly, that haunts the narrative, but the sense of unease, or disquiet. The lost passport, the sinking feeling one can imagine at realises their passport has been taken by someone else by mistake. The feeling one can imagine of seeing the same two men watching them in Venice as in Vienna. Twisting, foreign cities. Travel allows us to enter another version of ourselves: we become more open, possibly more happy, more curious, more grateful. The narrator gives a great deal of insight into travel, the following of which struck me as so true, so hilariously astute, that I underlined it twice: I do not know how I go about choosing the restaurants where I eat in unfamiliar cities. On the one hand I am too fastidious and wander the streets broad and narrow for hours on end before I make up my mind; on the other hand I generally finish up turning in simply anywhere, and then, in dreary surroundings and with a sense of discontent, select some dish that does not in the least appeal. On my second trip to Rome, last year, with a girl I no longer know, we did the exact same thing. It was our final night in the city and we wandered for over an hour, passing countless lovely restaurants thinking we will find one better. Soon enough we were bickering, hot, foot-sore, tired. We had been sightseeing all day anyway, and were now defeated. Without realising it, we had almost made it back to our hotel, where it was rather residential and all the restaurants that gathered around the tourist locations were gone. In the end we settled for a café-restaurant a single road over from our hotel. The menu didn’t appeal to us, and the food was poor. I kept saying to her over my meal, “It’s homely food, isn’t it? It’s nice homely Italian food.” Which I said by way of apology. She didn’t enjoy the meal and nor did I. And yet, we had passed so many good restaurants. The owner was beefy and dour-faced, and watched us suspiciously the whole time we were eating. We were the only customers. The whole experience was one we could have done with avoiding, especially on our last night in the city. Walking away from the restaurant I felt something close to vertigo, disappoint, distaste, disquiet. But the charm of Rome hadn’t failed me till then, walking the historic streets, returning again to the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and, in the Vatican, staring into the eyes of Augustus.
[image] Augustus in the Vatican - Photo by Me.
If only, I think, I could write these memories as Sebald does. As I have said before, his prose is haunting. He speaks, all at once, as a friend, and as a terrifying ghost-like figure, ethereal, omniscient…
He floats through memories, he drifts over borderlines....more
I've always struggled with memoirs. Recently, in my MA a woman sent me her work to read (a memoir) and I told her frankly that on th47th book of 2020.
I've always struggled with memoirs. Recently, in my MA a woman sent me her work to read (a memoir) and I told her frankly that on the most part, I don't enjoy memoirs. They are too self-indulgent, the writing (in my experience) never seems as good as fiction...I'm thinking specifically of Educated, which everyone seemed to love, but I thought was, well, terrible. It is difficult when talking about a real person and their real life, but I found the voice whiny, irritating and the writing was poor. That's not to belittle the things she went through, just the way she tells them.
Anyway, enough of ranting. This has been a long-winded way of saying, Newby has impressed me. Set in Italy during the War, his capture, and subsequent escape, Newby has written a compelling novel. His voice is perfectly balanced. In fact, I got the impression that he rarely used the word 'I', though he probably did. A large portion of the novel is spent describing Italy in a travel-writing fashion, and the characters he meets. The moments where Newby does talk, I like him. I think he would have been great to have a cup of tea with: witty, sensitive, the old style English gentleman. The writing was brilliant and his journey, though real, was fantastic to read.
The one thing I want to say - the title is terrible. I don't Newby helped himself very much. If someone hadn't recommended it, I would never read a book that begins with Love and War. There isn't a awful lot of love in this at all. There is certainly War in the backdrop, and the beginning and end. The title doesn't do the book justice, I don't think. Here are some quotes to capture Newby's voice and his writing.
Mostly they were cowardly spies whose legs gave way under them, so that they had to be carried, shrieking, to the place of execution and tied to stakes to prevent them sinking to the ground, and although I hoped that I wouldn't be like this, I wondered if I would be.
He was the one who proposed that we should dig a tunnel, the most dreary and unimaginative way of getting out of any prison.
Like most men he didn't like his wife to come up with the ideas he felt he ought to have had himself.
It was very dark, the water was surprisingly cold and I was very frightened, more frightened than I had ever been. What upset me more than anything, quite irrationally, was the thought that if we drowned - which seemed more than probable - none of our people would ever know what happened to us and why....more
In the wake of books like this, anything I say is rather useless. I don’t believe in “essential” books – I never seriously implore 137th book of 2020.
In the wake of books like this, anything I say is rather useless. I don’t believe in “essential” books – I never seriously implore that someone must read any certain books (other than wanting friends to read my favourite novels). Primo Levi is possibly the one writer who I would say to the world, This is essential reading.
This book was published here in England as If This is a Man; my parents returned recently from Tavistock with a Folio of this book as a gift. I own the book already but being gifted the Folio only urged me to read it sooner. When I first read Levi several years ago (Moments of Reprieve) I told my lecturer that I was sad he was gone, sadder still that he had committed suicide after so many years of writing about what had happened to him, after spreading such knowledge and humanity… Though, perhaps, that is what drove him to do what he did. My lecturer, the same lecturer I have mentioned in countless reviews, D., replied that he fancied the world was a better place with Primo Levi on it.
One cannot read any of Levi’s books, I don’t think, without being shocked two things. Firstly, his utter honesty – not just his honesty about the events, but the honesty about himself. He calls himself clumsy and weak. He, above all else, gives no time to blaming the Germans, hating them, or even wanting to claim revenge. My Folio edition ends with an Afterword, a Q&A with Levi himself, in which someone asked why he didn’t hate the Germans or seem to want revenge. Despite the long answer, this line alone distils the tone of Levi’s answer and also a hint to his character:
My personal temperament is not inclined to hatred. I regard it as bestial, crude, and prefer on the contrary that my actions and thoughts, as far as possible, should be the product of reason; therefore I have never cultivated within myself hatred as a desire for revenge, or as a desire to inflict suffering on my real or presumed enemy, or as a private vendetta. Even less do I accept hatred as directed collectively as an ethnic group, for example, all the Germans; if I accepted it, I would feel that i was following the precepts of Nazism, which was founded precisely on national and racial hatred.
You see, his humility is astounding. In an answer to another question he says, Only in this case am I, a non-Christian, prepared to follow the Jewish and Christian precept of forgiving my enemy, because an enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
But enough about the Afterword. This was Levi’s first book, which focuses on his time in Auschwitz, as many of his other books do. It is perhaps slightly more descriptive than his other works that I have read; the previously mentioned Moments of Reprieve focuses on both characters and incidents, but focuses less on imparting knowledge and understanding to the camps and how they operated. It is a difficult read, as one can imagine; I found I could only read it when I was alone, when I was feeling thoughtful and reflective; it is not a book to be read in snatches on a busy train, or at the dinner table. Levi requires attention. And how can one be sat with friends and family laughing around them as they read before them, I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself. Levi proclaims, Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence. - and who are we to deny that claim from a man who has endured what he has endured?
In 2013, or perhaps 2014, I visited Auschwitz myself. I cannot think what time of year it was, but there was snow on the ground, or else trodden snow, ice. The space alarmed me, the sweeping land that the camp sat on; the expanse of white earth made the place more desolate, more empty. Some of it has faded from my memory, but like novels one has read in the past, though the events themselves have faded, the impressions have not. People wandered about in silence. The only true memory that stands in my mind’s eye, clear as day, was the tank, the size of an aquarium tank in my memory, filled with shoes. We were warned by the tour guide before entering that this was disturbing, that it was difficult to witness, and indeed, several girls excused themselves from the room. I hadn’t read any Primo Levi back then, I was only sixteen years old. I do not know if I will ever return to it, or if it will be left like that, a half-formed and hazy memory, that stings ever so slightly, when recalled. If I can say it stings to recall, I cannot fathom the power and the numbness that it stirred in others. In the Afterword Levi says that he returned twice to the camp.
I have no more to say; I feel fickle when attempting to. Any comment I make is hardly a mark on the immeasurable weight that the history here has. It is best then to leave Levi’s work as lumps in our throats, stones in the deceiving smoothness of our world. And a reminder too, that there are still concentration camps on our planet today....more
Simply, this novel is about the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the 20th century. It is written in that wonderful and haunting voice96th book of 2020.
Simply, this novel is about the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the 20th century. It is written in that wonderful and haunting voice of Sebald’s, which I touched on in my recent Vertigo review. And, like in my Vertigo review, Sebald has once again taken me through the lives of the people in this book, but made me reflect on the people from my own life. I have decided that Sebald is so important to read because he makes us look into the past, into history, of western civilisation, but also into our own. Part of moving forwards is done by looking backwards.
In all four parts of this novel, Vladimir Nabokov is mentioned. Part way through the first part there is even a photograph of Nabokov, standing with a butterfly net (for he was an avid lover of butterflies, something I learnt in the south of France, from a man who loved them as much. I happened to be reading Lolita for the first time, and he told me that Nabokov frequented the south of France for its diversity of butterflies – there was some odd symmetry there). Other than the moments where Nabokov ‘haunts’ the narrative, it is almost entirely driven towards the unravelling of Sebald’s four subjects: Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth and Max Ferber. And before I move on, is Sebald our narrator? It is hard to tell, as ever. The first line of the novel is, At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live. I immediately presumed it would be his wife with him, but fans of Sebald would know that he married the Austrian-born, Ute. It was with Ute that he lived in an old rectory outside of Norwich. It could have been the very same place as described here. In the final part the narrator notes his birthday being the same as someone’s death on a gravestone, May 18th, which matches Sebald’s birthday. There are some discrepancies, but I believe that the narrator is, mostly, Sebald himself.
Dr Henry Selwyn is the first interesting portrait Sebald draws for us. He says brilliant lines like this, More and more, he said, he sensed that Nature itself was groaning and collapsing beneath the burden we placed upon it. But, like a lot of Sebald’s subjects, he was also a lonely man (Since then, almost my only companions have been plants and animals. Somehow or other I seem to get on well with them, said Dr Selwyn with an inscrutable smile, and, rising, he made a gesture that was most unusual for him.). It is a short part, disproportioned to the rest of the novel at only twenty-odd pages, but regardless, interesting, and ends with the reporting of a tragedy.
Paul Bereyter is the narrator’s old school teacher. The study delves first into his own memories of the man, which were my favourite part of the entire novel, I think, and then into facts learnt later in life, after research. Paul Bereyter story begins with tragedy, rather than ends. In fact, Bereyter reminded me of one of my university lecturers, Dr S. Often, as he set us all scrawling away in our pads, he disappeared from the door behind his desk to stand outside. A girl next to me once asked if I knew whether he smoked, and I told her that I couldn’t imagine so. She said, Well what is he doing out there then? I shrugged, Probably just enjoying the fresh air. I believe I was right, it was so in tune with his character to stand outside whenever he possible. It was so similar to Bereyter who is described as standing, whenever he could, in one of the window bays towards the head of the room, half facing the class and half turned to look out, his face at a slightly upturned angle with the sunlight glinting on his glasses. I found the part most moving because of the affinity I felt towards Bereyter, the free-thinker, the unusual, eccentric teacher. I imagined him being melancholic at times, and at other times, enthusiastic and happy as Dr S. is. Once, I was having a tutorial with Dr S. in his office at the university when thunder rumbled, it rolled, like unravelling a giant carpet over the city, over our heads. We both fell quiet. On que, rain began hitting the window, coming down sideways, in such large droplets that it sounded like hail. Possibly it did hail. For a moment, we remained that way, silent, both inclining our heads to look out at the shaking grey clouds before finally Dr S. continued what he was saying and that moment was lost to our memories, never to be mentioned again.
Ambros Adelwarth is an exploration of the narrator’s great-uncle. It is the longest part in the novel. Again, his part is rife with outlandishness, eccentricity, insanity. He says something that is reminiscent of Bereyter, that Since mid May 1969 – I shall have soon been retired for fifteen years – I have spent my life out of doors here, in the boathouse or the apiary, depending on the weather, and I no longer concern myself with what goes on in the so-called real world. No doubt I am now, in some sense, mad. The narrator tracks his great-uncle and his companion, Cosmo, who has a number of mental breakdowns. Cosmo believed a German film that was screened in New York was a labyrinth devised to imprison him and drive him mad, with all its mirror reversals (such a sentence that is so Borges that one remembers that Sebald was greatly influenced by him). Adelwarth once lost Cosmo, only to find him on the top floor of the house, in a room that had been previously locked, standing on a stool, his arms hanging down motionless, staring out at the sea where every now and then, very slowly, steamers passed by; and Adelwarth asked Cosmo what he was doing, and he had responded he wanted to see how his brother was, but he never did have a brother, according to Uncle Adelwarth. More madness, more tragedy; the novel again becomes slightly dizzying or intoxicating to read, to think about, just as Vertigo was before it.
Finally- Max Ferber. The narrator describes meeting him in Manchester in his twenties and then the narrative shifts to the life of Ferber’s mother, as the narrator acquires her memoirs.
Jane Alison's book Meander, Spiral, Explode has a fantastic exploration of this book's structure and themes. Highly recommended.
This was sorely disappointing. I was very excited to read it after so many good reviews but to be honest, I found this horribly uninteresting, the advThis was sorely disappointing. I was very excited to read it after so many good reviews but to be honest, I found this horribly uninteresting, the advice seemed, at many points, like common sense? It wasn't as insightful as I imagined. It was dry and arrogant, on the most part. The saving grace was the little snippets of history, which I found half interesting, but still, Machiavelli's tone was bone-dry....more
I exist only because my German grandmother and her brother were two of 35 children brought to England at the end of the Second Worl175th book of 2020.
I exist only because my German grandmother and her brother were two of 35 children brought to England at the end of the Second World War on the Kindertransport by an English Red Cross Charity worker named Edith Snellgrove. For whatever reason, she fell in love with my grandmother and my great-uncle, and, though not formally, adopted them. My grandmother is still alive today, whom I see twice a week, though she suffers from dementia and schizophrenia and has no command of the German language anymore. My brother and I slightly resent the fact we were never taught German, or indeed any other language, as children. Edith Snellgrove spoke 9 languages fluently and though she taught my grandmother bits of French and Russian, she was never invested enough to learn properly. In fact, when I was a child, my grandmother went once a week to German classes, to try and hold onto her native language that was left in Germany when she was brought to a foreign country by, essentially, a stranger, and had to learn English. Her father, Friedhelm Jung, died in 1944 in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp; he was stationed in Crimea as soon as the War broke out—he was already in prison in 1939, for refusing to give money to the Hitler Church. With me now, in my home, I have a box filled with photographs and even Friedhelm’s letters from Crimea that he sent to his wife, detailing, where he could, what it was like and how he was. These letters have mostly been translated by an old German teacher my grandmother met at a Quaker Meeting House. I could go on, but all this I hope to one day write into a novel, and this isn’t about my grandmother, but about Austerlitz.
Jacques Austerlitz is without a past. Of course, I don’t mean this literally. We all have pasts. One of my old professors used to talk about people, like good characters in novels, being like asteroids or stars in the sky, scorching traces behind them, burning history into space and time. Austerlitz has a trace behind him, but he recognises it is not a trace he associates with himself. In the same way, I look at the trace my grandmother has left behind her here in England, and I wonder if once she looked back and thought how unfamiliar her own life felt to her. That is what Austerlitz’s life seems to him. As I read the novel, I felt his character’s emptiness and alienation, the same feelings that arose out of Sebald’s other, brilliant, novel The Emigrants. His first novel, Vertigo, does not lack those feelings, though they are more rooted by the sense of, well, vertigo. And we do not have to look far to see the feelings of alienation, time and memory in The Rings of Saturn either. The scope in the other novels, however, are wider: there are multiple characters, multiple stories, fragments, sometimes almost fractal… But in Austerlitz, our vision is concentrated on this boy who was sent on the Kindertransport in 1939 by his parents to escape the persecution of the Jews, heading for his new Welsh parents. By the time our narrator meets Austerlitz, he meets a man who feels he has left the wrong trace behind him in the sky. As he says himself at one point in the novel, We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious. Thus begins Austerlitz’s narrative, his quest; and really, it is the oldest quest we know, a quest for home.
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Sebald’s choice of structure differs from what we are used to. Austerlitz’s narrative comprises most of the book; there are no speech marks, there are no conversations, per se, and the narrator ‘says’ nothing.. Though the narrator does have internal thoughts. Here is a beautiful observation he has on Austerlitz: I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselves, gradually emerged from the whirling nebulae of his astrophysical fantasies. Instead, Austerlitz’s monologue is a reel, paragraphs running for thirty or forty pages at a time, sometimes sentences running for seven pages at a time, as Austerlitz reports his long, rambling story in Sebald’s famous, ethereal style. And, like with Sebald’s other novels, it is filled with photographs, randomly occurring, sometimes relating to the text and sometimes not. He is a grown man, describing his quest for his identity and his history, and most importantly, and concretely, his real parents. So, as with Sebald’s other novels, Austerlitz is about history, time, memory, self and heritage; he is a voice of the post-war world, a world that Sebald understood, would never be the same for literature. As the New York Times said, with Primo Levi, Sebald is the “prime speaker of the Holocaust”. And Susan Sontag said,
“Is literary greatness still possible? What would a noble literary enterprise look like? One of the few answers available to English-speaking readers is the work of W.G. Sebald.”
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As I said in my first pre-review, I believe Sebald to be one of the most important writers of the latter half of the 20th century. It saddens me greatly that he only managed to write four novels before his death at the age of 57, after suffering a brain aneurysm whilst driving; he died before his car swerved out of control and collided with an oncoming lorry, severely injuring his daughter, though thankfully she survived the crash. There is a brilliant interview that took place, if I remember rightly, just over a week before his death, with Michael Silverblatt which I highly recommend. In fact, Silverblatt is perhaps one of the best interviewers out there for writers and has many fantastic ones, especially his ones with David Foster Wallace.
[image] Sebald—Photo from the New Yorker
I have come to the end of Sebald’s oeuvre then. Next year I plan to reread The Rings of Saturn, and then I’ll probably reread Vertigo and The Emigrants too. Then, before I know it, it’ll be time to return to Austerlitz’s narrative, which will just as moving and important as it was now, and in 20 years, 40 years, I believe it will stand the same. I think about Austerlitz when I take books from my grandmother's bookcase, old editions of Goethe and Hesse, written in German, a language she no longer understands. Her own language, in a way, lost. And I realise that where we come from, who we are, what defines us, how we create ourselves from our pasts, and what our pasts do to create us: these are things that never fade....more