The Murderess – Alexandros Papadiamantis (1903, trans. Peter Levy 1983) 127 pages
Trigger warning: mentions infanticide
I’ve long been interested in how witches are portrayed. It’s seems so often bound up with women on the edge of (patriarchal) society – single, childless, conventionally unattractive, isolated; perhaps with the suggestion of healing knowledge that threatens male medical practitioners. It’s something brilliantly sent up in the Blackadder II episode Bells where Blackadder gives up on his doctor who prescribes courses of leeches for everything, and instead visits the wilds of Putney (!) to consult the wise woman:
In The Murderess, Alexandros Papadiamantis draws on some of these stock characteristics and makes his protagonist an older woman, a mother who is also a healer, whose actions cause her to become a murderer living in wild environments. Like many ghouls, she has several names: Hadoula, Jannis Frankissa, Frankojannou.
“She provided herbs, she made ointments, she gave massages, she cured the evil eye, she put together medicine for the sick, for anaemic girls, for pregnant women and women after childbirth and for those with women’s diseases.”
At the start of the novella she is completely sleep-deprived, helping her daughter care for her sickly newborn:
“For many nights Frankojannou had permitted herself no sleep. She had willed her sore eyes open, while she kept vigil beside this little creature who had no idea what trouble she was giving, or what torture she must undergo in her turn, if she survived.”
Papadiamantis takes us back and forth in time to show the oppression of a patriarchal society. Female babies mean dowries to be found, and once married, hard lives keeping homes and raising children, often with little or no support from male spouses.
Something inside Hadoula snaps, and she kills her granddaughter, unable to contend with the life the child will have ahead of her:
“Frankojannou’s brain really had begun to smoke. She had gone out of her mind in the end. It was the consequence of her proceeding to higher matters. She leant over the cradle.”
This is the start of her killing the young female babies and children of the island. It is set on Papadiamantis’ home island of Skiathos, its beauty contrasting with the horrors:
“Below her the river cut deep through the Acheilas ravine, and its stream filled all the deep valley with soft murmurs. In appearance it was motionless and lakelike, but in reality perpetually in motion under the tall and long-tressed planes. Among mosses and bushes and ferns it prattled secretly, kissed the trunks of trees, creeping like a serpent along the length of the valley, green-coloured from leafy reflections, kissing and biting at once the rocks and the roots, a murmuring, limpid stream, full of little crabs which ran to hide in piles of sand, while a shepherd, letting little lambs graze on the dewy greenery, came to lean down over the water.”
The Murderess is carefully balanced: it doesn’t condone Hadoula but nor does it make her a monster. She is a desperate woman driven by the life she has led and the oppression she foresees for women in her society, to undertake the most monstrous of acts.
Papadiamantis makes it clear she has lost her sanity (although she continues to act by her own rationality), and also that she has guilt and regret, but also never remotely excuses or justifies what she does.
The story has a fabulist element but without detracting from Hadoula’s murders. I felt the author was drawing on centuries of storytelling to reframe the witches of folklore and ask what it was in societies that had brought them to that role in the first place?
“But mostly she was gathering herbs to forget the grief which tormented her.”
Raymond Radiguet was only twenty when he died, having published two novels, of which Count d’Orgel’s Ball was the second, some poetry and a play. He had led a life that brought him into contact with the foremost artists of the day, including Picasso and his lover Jean Cocteau, who wrote the foreword to the NYRB Classics edition I read.
This made me a bit trepidatious in approaching this novella, wondering if it was a piece of juvenilia that wouldn’t have otherwise garnered much attention. But I shouldn’t be so ageist, because I really found a lot to enjoy in Count d’Orgel’s Ball.
It tells the story of a love triangle amongst the beautiful and privileged in the 1920s. Mahaut is from an old family, and desperate for love when she marries young:
“She recovered some of the freshness of her early childhood when, at eighteen, she married Count Anne d’Orgel, one of our country’s best names. She fell madly in love with her husband who, in return showed her much gratitude and the warmest friendship, which he himself took for love.”
She adores her sociable and brilliant husband, who is fairly harmless but entirely vacuous:
“Nobody knew the reason for his prestige or, at least, for his brilliant reputation. His name had little to do with it since talent comes first even amongst those who worship names.”
Into their world comes François de Séryeuse, a young man not entirely enthralled by the Count’s charm and prestige. This works in his favour and the three spend more and more time together.
“He [the Count] adopted people more than he made friends with them. In return, he demanded a lot. He wanted to lead the way, to be in control.”
The Count doesn’t sustain control though, as François and Mahaut fall in love. For me this was the weakest point of the novella. Radiguet is excellent at observing people and social situations; he is incisive regarding pretention and social mores. Where the story falters for me is in creating fully rounded characters and the emotional ties between them. But perhaps I’m being unfair, as Radiguet is describing a world filled with shallow and/or naïve people. He doesn’t view them as having great emotional depth:
“It would be safe to say that François’ ideas on love were ready made. But since he had made them himself, he believed they were cut to size. He did not realise he had cut them out of limp feelings.”
The writing style is fluid and often scathing. It’s so readable and entirely unflinching in its view of a particular part of society at a particular time.
I thought there were a few rough edges at points in Count D’Orgel’s Ball; a tendency to tell rather than show, and characters as vehicles for social satire rather than fully recognisable people. But these are little quibbles and having written this novella at nineteen, I can only wonder what Radiguet would have achieved had he lived longer.
“Happiness is like good health: one is not aware of it.”
I don’t normally do book haul posts but I thought I would just this once, to celebrate the end of my 2018 book-buying ban, which much to my amazement I stuck to for the entire year – not one book did I buy. (Actually, that’s not strictly true, I bought 6 books during the year, but all for other people, and not in a cheating I’ll-read-this-first-then-give-it-away-and-claim-it-was-a-present-all-along way, honest!)
But before I sound too smug (and I do feel pretty smug tbh, I have terrible willpower and never manage to stick to any resolution), it wasn’t a total success. The aim of the ban was for me to read the unread books I own, as my flat was starting to look like this:
There’s definitely a vast improvement, but the discovery of the library fiction section and a terrible reading slump in the latter part of the year meant I didn’t get through as many books as I hoped. So while the ban is over I’m planning to still try and exercise some restraint and get that TBR pile down further.
Anyhoo, on 1 January I ordered some books online which are winging their way to me, and then yesterday, for the first time in over a year, I set foot in the lovely bibliophile’s crack den charity book shop which is almost directly opposite my flat. This is what I came away with:
Yes, 10 books is me exercising restraint. You can see where the need for the ban came from, can’t you? And to be honest, I’m slightly regretting not buying the five or so (OK, it was more like 15) books I additionally considered but returned to the shelves because I am a whole new woman.
The first thing that caught my eye was this little collection of mini-plays by Michael Frayn, out on display because it was in a gimmicky sleeve and who’s going to fall for that and decide they immediately need this book? *cough*
I enjoy reading plays and Michael Frayn is a safe pair of hands, so I think this will be fun.
One of the many joys of charity bookshops is hunting down those green Viragos, and I found a lovely pair of GB Sterns in great condition. I’ve never read any GB Stern but I remembered her name from Jane at Beyond Eden Rock’s Birthday Book of Underappreciated Lady Authors. Part of my new-found restraint would generally include not buying more than one book by an author I’ve not read, but that lasted all of 5 minutes. They were green Viragos! In lovely condition! My willpower can only take so much…
These are the first two in the Rakonitz chronicles and the blurb on the back is really tempting, so I’m looking forward to these.
I bought one more green Virago:
I’m not a massive fan of Shaw but the blurb on the back says ‘Shaw’s view was that the false idealisation of women by men enslaved both sexes’ and he’s dismantling this in a comic way, so maybe this will be where I learn to like him.
Sticking with the theme of buying books because I trust the publishers, I picked up these by NYRB and Peirene:
The Delius is apparently a single 117-page long sentence, which frankly sounds horrific, but I trust Peirene and the translator is Jamie Bulloch who does great work so I’m still hopeful. And I do love a novella, which leads me to these:
The Auschwitz Violin, to my cynical mind, looked like an awful lot of other books with similar titles/themes which publishers love, but its novella length means I’ll give it a go, and it does look promising. The Vesaas I’ve never heard of but the reviews quoted on the back cover are rapturous and I enjoy Scandinavian literature so I’m looking forward to this.
Finally, I was pleased to come across Jill by Philip Larkin because Ali’s review last month reminded me that I wanted to read some of Larkin’s prose. Infuriatingly, that mark on the cover was caused by me trying to peel a label off, which I did carefully but it still damaged the cover:
When I’m in charge of the world, stickers will be banned from book covers, that’s a promise. Then I’ll try and sort out world peace and stuff, it’s all about priorities 😀
So, that’s my first book haul of the year! Looking back on the 2018 ban I would say I’ve learnt these things:
At the ripe old age of 41 I can still surprise myself
I might actually have some willpower after all
Its satisfying to see the TBR diminishing
I’m never going to not have piles of books
Which means I need to move somewhere with really cheap property prices to house them all
I still can’t be trusted in a charity bookshop
How about you, dear reader? Any bookish resolutions for 2019? Have you read any of my haul? Where would recommend I start?
Here’s to a wonderful year ahead with many great reads for all of us 😊 Apropos of absolutely nothing, but just because I’ve been listening to her a lot since 2019 started, here is Kate Bush doing a reggae cover of an Elton John song whilst playing a ukulele*. Because she can, because she’s awesome:
This is part of a series of occasional posts where I look at works from Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century. The posts have been a bit too occasional, the challenge is taking me forever! I’m hoping this post will see me starting to build momentum again. Please see the separate page (link at the top) for the full list of books.
Contempt (Il disprezzo) by Alberto Moravia (1954 trans. Angus Davidson 1999) is a novel with a title that instructs the reader regarding the attitude to take to the narrator: Molteni is truly contemptible.
He is married to the gorgeous Emilia and at first they are very happy together, despite their poverty, as Molteni tries to make a living as a writer and earn enough to keep them in their modest home.
“Thus I never had so much to complain of as I did during the time when in truth – as I later came to realise – I was completely and profoundly happy.”
Gradually however, things start to unravel. They meet Battista, a crass, vulgar film producer. A seemingly innocuous event occurs but from this time Emilia starts to treat Molteni coolly. And so over the course of this short novel we see the disintegration of the marriage, the causes of which are entirely apparent to the reader but remain elusive to Molteni as he is so utterly self-absorbed.
He’s a terrible snob: he looks down on his wife for being less educated than him and has dreams of being a great writer. He feels his scriptwriting is beneath him yet he doesn’t really excel at that either, trying to write a film version of The Odyssey for co-producers with very different ideas. He’s so busy being intellectual that life is passing him by and he has no idea how incredibly stupid he is.
He has a degree of insight into abstract concepts, such as his decision to become a Communist, but is unable to translate it into meaningful action:
“Usually, in simpler, less cultivated people, this process occurs without their knowing it, in the dark depths of consciousness where, by a kind of mysterious alchemy, egoism is transmuted into altruism, hatred into love, fear into courage, but to me, accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible…yet I was aware the whole time I was being swayed by material, subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.”
The irony when he claims “I would never have become a Communist if I had not bought the lease of that over-expensive flat” completely passes him by.
And of course, he is completely blinded to the person he shares his life with. Emilia become progressively unhappier throughout the novel, which Molteni barely acknowledges, being so wrapped up in himself:
“Her beauty had about it a look of subjection, of reluctance, the cause of which I was at a loss to identify.”
It’s a short novel so I can’t say too much about plot, except things come to a head when the couple holiday with Battista in Capri, changing their lives irrevocably. Contempt shows how intellectualism and artistry carry a danger of relentless self-focus; coupled with Molteni’s material concerns, he loses all sight of people and human feelings, only realising where true meaning lies when it is too late.
I couldn’t have spent too much longer with Molteni but as a short, sharp novel, Contempt works well and has plenty of food for thought.
To end, the trailer for Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (1963), which was inspired by Contempt:
Last week I got an invite to a friend’s wedding. I know you won’t judge me, my bookish friends, when I say that I was pleased to get the invite and looking forward to it, but only became truly excited when I saw it was taking place in the birthplace of a favourite poet – roll on October!
Anyway….. me being a selfish friend aside, this prompted me to think that June is traditionally a month for weddings and so a suitable theme for this week.
Firstly, The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (1946), which tells the story of twelve-year old Frankie over a few sultry days in late August, around the wedding of her older brother:
“She knew that her only brother, Jarvis, was to be married. He had become engaged to a girl in Winter Hill just before he went to Alaska. Frankie had not seen her brother for a long, long time and his face had become masked and changing, like a face seen underwater. But Alaska! Frankie had dreamed of it constantly.”
Frankie is a misfit – very tall for a girl (I thought she sounded entirely normal but then I was 5’10” by age 14), with hair she’s just shorn into a crew cut, kept company by her housekeeper Berenice and her cousin John Henry, who is half her age. Her mother died in childbirth and her father is a distant presence. She is deeply unhappy and pins all her hopes on her brother and his new wife taking her with them when they leave.
McCullers creates the stultifying atmosphere perfectly:
“The clock ticked very slowly on the shelf above the stove, and it was only quarter to six. The glare outside was still hard and yellow and bright. In the backyard the shade beneath the arbor was black and solid. Nothing moved. From somewhere far away came the sound of whistling, and it was grieving an August song that did not end. The minutes were very long.”
I don’t think it’s putting too much of a modern interpretation on the novel to say a dominant theme is about gender and identity. Frankie has a gender-neutral name and does not conform to a feminine ideal. John Henry wears a dress. Markers of identity shift: Frankie’s name changes to F Jasmine in the second part of the novel. Both children feel their ideal world would not contain gender binaries:
“She planned it so that people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls, whichever way they felt like and wanted. But Berenice would argue with her about this, insisting the law of human sex was exactly right as it was and could in no way be improved. And then John Henry West would very likely add his two cents’ worth about this time, and think that people ought to be half boy and half girl”
At core though, it is a tale of a sad, lonely, misunderstood child who desperately wants to be seen and heard, and believes the wedding day will give her this chance:
“And since it was the day when past and future mingled, F Jasmine did not wonder that it was strange and long. So these were the main reasons why F Jasmine felt, in an unworded way, that this was a morning different from all mornings she had ever known. And of all these facts and feelings the strongest of all was the need to be known for her true self and recognised.”
What Frankie needs to recognise is what she already has: a deep intimacy with Berenice and John Henry who both love her.
“The three of them sat silent, close together and they could feel and hear each other’s breaths.”
The Member of the Wedding is an atmospheric, touching story that has many layers to it. It’s a tightly contained novel (188 pages in my edition) which still manages a remarkable richness of characterisation and setting.
The Member of the Wedding was a Broadway production and then a film with the same actors in 1952. I’ve not seen it but I believe it was acclaimed, although the claustrophobic quality probably worked better on stage:
Secondly, Cassandra at the Wedding, by Dorothy Baker (1962). Like The Member of the Wedding, the story centres not on the couple but on someone with a strong emotional investment in the proceedings. Cassandra is writing her PhD at Berkley and has to return home because her twin sister Judith is marrying a doctor she met in New York. The sisters are exceptionally, unhealthily close and Judith’s move to New York had sent Cassandra into a tailspin. At the start of the novel she is considering the Golden Gate bridge in term of a suicide vehicle:
“I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I’d go home, attend my sister’s wedding as invited, help hook-and-zip her into whatever she wore, take over the bouquet while she received the ring, through the nose or on the finger, wherever she chose to receive it, and hold my peace.”
Their mother is dead and their father self-medicates with alcohol. It becomes apparent that the twins’ claustrophobic relationship was an extension of the elitist, exclusive culture their parents encouraged. But Judith has realised that this was not a helpful way to live:
“as a family we’d always been something of a closed corporation…we had our own pinnacle to look down from. But when we went away to college we couldn’t quite keep it the way it was on the ranch.”
Judith has dared to want the ordinary: to be out in the world, to get married and to set up a home. The few days when they are both back at home will bring the twins’ differing needs into direct conflict.
“[I] stood up and looked down at Cass and knew I loved her, but that it was not the same thing as being married and feeling married, and that now it never could or would be. I felt very solemn about it, and solemn words came into my mind. ‘Whom God hath split asunder, let nothing join them together. Ever.’ “
Cassandra is an intriguing character: bright, funny, acerbic, incredibly vulnerable, and monumentally selfish and self-centred. Her obsession with Judith is in many ways an extension of self-obsession:
“To be like us isn’t easy, it requires constant attention to detail. I’ve thought it out; we’ve thought it out together. I’ve tried to explain to my doctor that it’s a question of working ceaselessly at being as different as possible because there must be a gap before it can be bridged. And the bridge is the real project.”
All the same I was rooting for Cassandra – not to get what she wanted, because that was a continuation of the destructively claustrophobic relationship with her sister – but to find a way through, for all involved.
Cassandra at the Wedding is a psychologically astute, funny and sad novel. Dorothy Baker balances the differing tones expertly; I’d definitely be interested to read more by her.
To end, The Dixie Cups in remarkable 1980s dresses (were wired hems a thing?), and looking like they’ve not bothered aging since their 60s heyday:
After Claude – Iris Owens (1973) 206 pages (cheating my own criteria by 6 pages)
Trigger warning: mentions rape
I bought this one day when I finished the book I was reading more quickly than expected and I was waiting for a friend, who was late. I don’t like being without a book to read on my person and I found a late-opening charity shop. Amongst the Da Vinci Codes and James Patterson’s entire back catalogue I was thankful to spy a New York Review of Books logo. They’re a reliable, interesting publisher and so I found myself launched into the acerbic wit of Iris Owens, totally unprepared.
After Claude is funny, but it also features a despicable heroine. Kudos to Owens for not feeling it is necessary to write an attractive, likeable female for her lead, but really, Harriet Daimler is one of the most infuriating, obnoxious and unpleasant people ever committed to paper. She moves from friend to friend, sponging off them until her unrelenting selfishness alienates them and they chuck her out. She may be depressed: she sleeps all day, watches trashy quiz shows and eats, that’s it. But any sympathy the reader may feel is limited by her rudeness, prejudice and manipulations towards all who cross her path. She frequently uses homophobic language; she is racist; she denies her own Jewishness without realising that her denials illuminate that which she is trying to hide:
“ ‘Mazeltov,’ he congratulated me in an unfamiliar tongue.”
Who doesn’t know what Mazeltov means? Harriet is also completely delusional. The story begins “I left Claude, the French rat.” What quickly emerges is that Claude has thrown her out, sick of her utter selfishness and bitterness.
“Claude, who had learned his English in England, spoke with one of those snotty, superior accents, stuffed into a slimy French accent, the whole mess flavoured with an occasional American hipsterism, making him sound like an extremely rich, self-employed spy.”
What Claude quickly learns is that trying to throw someone out who won’t listen and is totally self-interested, is no mean feat.
“ ‘Me a bore?’ I laughed, amazed that the rat would resort to such a bizarre accusation. I have since learned never to be amazed at what men will resort to when cornered by a woman’s intelligence.”
Over the course of the story we learn how Harriet and Claude met, when she was thrown out of her friend Rhoda’s house, for something horrific which I won’t include for fear of spoilers, but would you live with someone who treated you thus?
“Had I been insensitive when I told her ‘Rhoda, I have nothing per se against your karate classes but rather than pin all your hopes on a rapist, wouldn’t a cruise make more sense?’”
What kept me reading was partly wanting to see what would happen to someone so extremely selfish and self-serving that normal rules don’t apply: Harriet could do anything. Also, amongst the rancour are some bitingly funny observations, such as this regarding a friend’s marriage:
“It goes without saying that though ideally suited and ecstatically happy, Jerry and Maxine had flown directly from their wedding ceremony to group therapy, paying top prices for the privilege of insulting each other in front of an audience.”
What happens to Harriet after Claude is bizarre. She meets a guru-type and ends up begging to be allowed to join their cult, even after suffering sexual humiliation at their hands. Ultimately then, Harriet is both horrible and pitiful, extremely vulnerable but bent on destroying anyone who might want to help.
Like a pratfall in which someone ends up genuinely hurt, After Claude is funny but you feel you shouldn’t laugh; it’s painful and you want to tear your eyes away. Owens is an accomplished writer but I’m not sure I could have stood a much longer novel.
Well, I’m off to an unbelievably slow start with German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline and Lizzy, given that we’re more than halfway through the month and this is my first post. I’m hoping I’ll get some more posts in before the month is out, but clearly myself and productivity are not friends right now.
A picture of sloths in a pathetic and failed attempt to make my laziness more endearing
Firstly, The Glass Bees (Gläserne Bienen, 1957) by Ernst Junger (trans. Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Mayer, NYRB, 2000), which was frankly, completely terrifying. Generally I’m not one for sci-fi/speculative fiction and now I know why, because they scare me silly. Written in the 1950s, the story is set in an undisclosed time and place sometime in future. At the time of publication, my edition tells me it was dismissed as irrelevant. To which I can only respond:
And commend those critics for their optimism. See if you can find any contemporary parallels: a powerful and ruthless business man has developed advanced technology and uses this to assert control of society through media and entertainment. Now I think about it, a more appropriate David Tennant gif would have been:
The tale is narrated by Richard, a war veteran and ambiguous character, who is considering being employed by the Donald Trump/Rupert Murdoch hybrid business man Zapparoni as a security chief/spy on his workers:
“The people employed by Zapparoni were an extremely difficult lot. Engaged in a most peculiar kind of work – the handling of minute and often extremely intricate objects – they gradually developed an eccentric, over-scrupulous behaviour, and they developed personalities which took offense at motes in a sunbeam.”
Zapparoni uses microtechnology but he has also developed automatons who are more than human. There are those that look like him and enable him to be in more than one place at once, and those who are used to promote an idealised form through film and media:
“Thus one might say that these figures did not simply imitate the human form but carried it beyond its possibilities and dimensions…the movements and expressions indicated that nature had been studied and surpassed.”
Likewise, the titular bees are micro-robots much more efficient at collecting nectar than actual bees. This unstable reality is part of the novel’s overall feel of not being able to trust what you see and struggling to understand feelings that are evoked by such odd circumstances. Richard is a cavalry soldier, and as such is an anachronism, harking back to days of animal and human power when the world has moved on. He is virtually unemployable, which is what leads him to Zapparoni in the first place, wholly aware that if he takes the job, at some point he is likely to meet with an ‘accident’.
Events at his job interview are equally discombobulating, with the elderly Zapparoni living in surprisingly old-fashioned surroundings and sending Richard into the garden for a gruesome test. I won’t say much more for fear of spoilers as The Glass Bees is a short (209 pages in my edition), tightly written novel set over 2 days. It packs a lot into such a short space though, as Richard’s immediate experiences and reminiscences give much food for thought on the nature of human beings, their relationship with technology, how power is wielded, where morality lies… big questions which mean The Glass Bees certainly leads itself to re-reading.
It is not a bleak novel; there is an enduring faith in humankind:
“I came to recognise that one single human being, comprehended in his depth, who gives generously from the treasures of his heart, bestows on us more riches than Caesar or Alexander could ever conquer. Here is our kingdom, the best of monarchies, the best republic. Here is our garden, our happiness.”
However, this faith is constantly under assault and The Glass Bees acts as a stark warning on the human price of technological progress:
“Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other; there is, in any case, a parting of the ways. .. Technical perfection strives towards the calculable, human perfection towards the incalculable.”
I’m not sure we’ve really learnt the lessons The Glass Bees presents. As I said at the start, terrifying.
From a speculative future to a novel that shows the fallout of the recent past, The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten, 1992) by WG Sebald (trans. Michael Hulse, Harvill Press, 1996). The Emigrants is familiar territory for readers of Sebald, dealing with displacement, memory and loss with a deceptively simple voice and a narrative that blurs the lines between fiction and autobiography, complete with illustrative photographs. Narrated by an emigrant who comes to England and settles in Manchester, its four sections tell the stories of different emigrants with whom he comes into contact. The first section, ‘Dr Henry Selwyn’ tells of his eccentric landlord.
“Dr Selwyn liked to be out of doors, and especially in a flint-built hermitage in a remote corner of the garden, which he called his folly and which he had furnished with the essentials. But one morning just a week or so after we had moved in, I saw him standing at an open window of one of his rooms on the west side of the house. He had his spectacles on and was wearing a tartan dressing gown and a white neckerchief. He was aiming a gun with two inordinately long barrels up into the blue.”
As this passage captures, the short section (around 20 pages) is both whimsical and yet with an underlying sense of something much more serious. It shows how, following the second world war, what we see on the surface belies the enduring damage and pain that persists.
The second section ‘Paul Bereytyer’ begins with a suicide. The narrator’s childhood teacher has lain on the train tracks and the narrator pieces together his past in an attempt to understand why. Paul is a quarter Jewish and during the war “out of blind rage or even a sort of perversion” he returns to Berlin and gets called up into the artillery. What is truly haunting in this section is that the clues to his end are there all along for those who knew him:
“Railways had always meant a great deal to him – perhaps he felt they were headed for death. Timetables and directories, all the logistics of the railways, had at times been an obsession with him… I thought of the stations, tracks, goods depots and signal boxes that Paul had so often drawn on the blackboard and which we had to copy into our exercise books as carefully as we could.”
The third section tells the story of the narrator’s Great-Uncle Adelwarth who travels around the world but ultimately ends up in an institution. In the final section, ‘Max Ferber’, an artist tells the narrator the story of his mother and the impact of the holocaust on his family.
“Memory…makes ones head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.”
The Emigrants is an incredible novel. Sebald writes with simplicity yet great beauty, building a picture of enduring war wounds. He demonstrates how the legacy of conflict is still to be felt, if only we open our eyes to see it.
“I now sometimes feel that at that moment I beheld an image of death [it] lasted only a very short time, and passed over me like the shadow of a bird in flight.”
To end, the trailer for the most expensive German TV series ever made, apparently. It’s set during the Weimar Republic, I’m 4 episodes in and enjoying it so far (contains scenes of drug taking and sauciness):
October is Black History Month in the UK, so here is a little contribution, two wonderful novels that I want to gush about 😊
Firstly, Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta (2015), a remarkably accomplished debut novel, set in the years during & immediately after the Biafran civil war.
Ijeoma loses her beloved father in the war:
“Uzo. It was the kind of name I’d have liked to fold up and hold in the palm of my hand, if names could be folded and held that way. So that if I were ever lost, all I’d have to do would be to open up my palm and allow the name, like a torchlight, to show me the way.”
Her mother struggles to cope with her grief and so Ijeoma is sent away, and it is then that she meets Amina. The young women’s mutual attraction is problematic within their highly religious society (not only are they gay, but Ijeoma is a Christian Igbo while Amina is a Muslim Hausa), and so their secret romance is always tempered with the knowledge that they could be torn apart at any moment:
“When our lips finally met, she kissed me hungrily, as if she’d been waiting for this all along. I breathed in the scent of her, deeply, as if to take in an excess of it, as if to build a reserve for that one day when she would be gone.”
Ijeoma’s sexuality forces her to question much that forms the foundation of her life in Nigeria, not least the religion she has been brought up to and educated within.
“Just because the Bible recorded one specific thread of events, one specific history, why did that have to invalidate or discredit all other threads, all other histories? Woman was created for man, yes. But why did that mean woman could not also have been created for another woman? Or man for another man? Infinite possibilities, and each one of them perfectly viable.”
Being gay is a dangerous thing for Ijeoma and the threat is very real; at one point a club she is in is raided. The women hide in a bunker left over from the war, but one who doesn’t make it is brutally murdered. Okparanta captures the fallout from the war and the ongoing violence faced by gay Nigerians in a dramatic but never sensationalist way. Under these pressures, Ijeoma tries to lead a conventional life but it unsurprisingly leads to true misery for all those involved:
“I acknowledge to myself that sometimes I am a snail. I move myself by gliding. I contract my muscles and produce a slime of tears. Sometimes you see the tears and sometimes you don’t. It is my tears that allow me to glide. I glide slowly. But, slowly, I glide. It is a while before I am gone.”
Under the Udala Trees is very much rooted in a particular country at a particular time, but it has something to say as well that is beyond the specific. It is most definitely about the continued criminalisation of gay people in Nigeria, and it is also about how all of us have to question the beliefs and structures we are raised within, and find our own way to be free:
“That tethering way in which the familiar manages to grab ahold of us and pin us down.”
This is an accomplished first novel, and Okparanta is a wise writer. She creates beautiful prose, compelling characters and a well-paced story, and she has important things to say about the world and those of us in it.
“Sometimes it is hard to know to whom the tragedy really belongs.”
I’m excited to see what she does next.
Secondly, The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart (1972, trans. Barbara Bray 2015), and one more stop on my Around the World in 80 Books Reading Challenge, hosted by Hard Book Habit.
I wanted to read this after seeing Claire’s wonderful review at Word by Word (over a year ago – I get there in the end…) My copy is the New York Review of Books edition, which I recommend for a sensitive, enthusiastic introduction by Jamaica Kincaid.
Narrated by Telumee, it tells the story of her life on the island of Guadeloupe, and the women she is descended from. The opening paragraph is just beautiful:
“A man’s country may be cramped or vast according to the size of his heart. I’ve never found my country too small, though that isn’t to say my heart is great. And if I could choose it’s here in Guadeloupe that I’d be born again, suffer and die. Yet not long back my ancestors were slaves on this volcanic, hurricane-swept, mosquito-ridden island. But I didn’t come into the world to weigh the world’s woe. I prefer to dream, on and on, standing in my garden, just like any other old woman of my age, til death comes and takes me as I dream. Me and all my joy.”
Part One tells the story of her mother Victory, and her grandmother, Queen With No Name, who raises Telumee. Her great-grandmother was a freed slave and her descendants have lives which are hard and with more than their fair share of grief, but also with moments of love and joy. After her father is stabbed, Telumee’s mother is swamped in grief, until she falls in love again. She doesn’t want her young daughter living with them, and so Telumee goes to live with Queen Without Name:
“Grandmother was past the age for bending over the white man’s earth binding canes, weeding and hoeing, withstanding the wind, and pickling her body in the sun as she had done all her life. It was her turn to be an elder; the level of her life had fallen; it was now a thin trickle flowing slowly among the rocks, just a little stirring every day, a little effort and a little reward.”
Telumee grows up in the loving home of her grandmother but Queen Without Name cannot protect her from making a disastrous marriage. Telumee survives though, and The Bridge of Beyond is a tale of overcoming adversity, of finding strength within yourself that you didn’t know you had, and of drawing on the strength of other women to help you endure.
“Through all her last days Grandmother was whistling up a wind for me, to fill my sails so that I could resume my voyage.”
Schwarz-Bart is a beautiful writer who captures an individual voice compassionately without descending into cliché. I’ll definitely be looking to read more of her work.
madame bibi lophile recommends 