Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "20th-century-fiction"

I had read Embers, The Rebels, Memoir of Hungary, Esther’s Inheritance, and the French edition of The Confessions of a Bourgeois (the English version is yet to come) by Márai, and I am a big admirer of his, but I didn’t expect to be so impressed by Portraits of a Marriage, his latest novel in English, released early this year by Knopf in George Szirtes’s outstanding translation. How should I put this? Portraits of a Marriage is a masterpiece. Portraits of a Marriage is one of the greatest 20th century novels. Portraits of a Marriage is a work whose psychological finesse equals that of Proust. Portraits of a Marriage has some of the most subtle socio-political observations I have encountered on Europe’s (dying) bourgeois society and post-war American society. This is, by the way, the only book by Márai in which he tackles—albeit briefly—the subject of America, the country where he lived in exile for about forty years. And finally, Portraits of a Marriage is a novel about the nature of romantic love written with the raw lucidity one finds only in Tolstoy or Stefan Zweig.

The novel has four parts, each in a different voice: Ilonka’s—the wife of a very wealthy man, who tries to unveil her husband’s secret; Peter’s—the husband secretly in love with his mother’s servant; Judit’s—the servant who has grown up (literally) in a ditch, and who will one day marry the Master (i.e., Peter); Ede’s—Judit’s last lover in Rome (where she lives in exile after the Communists come to power in Hungary), a drummer turned bartender in New York.

Although each part is very captivating, the best is, probably, Judit’s confession. It is the most intelligent analysis of bourgeois culture I have ever read, written from the perspective of an outsider, which makes it sound at times like an anthropological study. This analysis is all the more extraordinary since Márai identified strongly as a “bourgeois,” that is, as belonging to a culture entirely destroyed by the Communist regime.

If you read only one novel this year, read this!Portraits of a Marriage

Huang Fan is a Taiwanese author who is worth reading, but who had the misfortune of having been translated too late. Zero is a dystopian novella written in the speculative tradition and originally published in 1981. To predict a world in which the upper classes live in a sterile environment in which they often interact only through computer screens, books have been digitized and print no longer exists, and the planet is a global village led by an international elite with a dubious past, would be impressive in 1981—but not in 2012.

The book has other short stories, some with political references (“Lai Suo”) and others told with dry humor within a sophisticated, metafictional frame (“How to Measure the Width of a Ditch”). For all these reasons, this should be a captivating book, and yet, it’s not. As often with Chinese literature, it is hard to know whether the problem is the translation, the original, or both. The reader can tell that the writer is intelligent and (sort of) witty, but the humor is sometimes flat. And the stories are uneven, oscillating between the (desire for the) sublime and the ridiculous.

The Moon over the Mountain by Atsushi Nakajima (Trans. from the Japanese by Paul McCarthy and Nobuko Ochner, Autumn Hill Books, 2011)

You may be as surprised as I was to find out that stories on classical Chinese topics are a special literary genre in Japan, and their writers enjoy great respect. Atsushi Nakajima is such a writer. Although he died young and published almost nothing during his lifetime, he became very popular after his death in 1942.

The recurrent characters in many of the stories in this collection are representations of famous Chinese historical characters from eras going as far back as the eighth century. Readers somewhat familiar with Chinese classical tales may recognize some of the names and some of the events narrated.

Three stories, in particular, have stayed with me: “The Moon over the Mountain,” in which an unsuccessful poet who keeps complaining about his unhappy fate is turned into a tiger; “The Master,” in which an archer, after having studied this art with two great masters, achieves perfection only when he understands that “Perfect action lies in inaction, perfect speech abandons words, and perfect archery means never shooting;” and “The Disciple,” which tells the story of a disciple of Confucius. For those of us who don’t know much about the latter (whose Chinese name was, apparently, Kong Qiu), the story skillfully presents the life and philosophy of this world-famous man through a captivating narrative. I now understand why it is said that his philosophy is pragmatic: whether he served the rich and powerful (for a while he was a minister) or wandered aimlessly in relative poverty together with his disciples, he tried to do good, but never in an idealistic way. In extreme situations, he always advised his disciples to save their own skin rather than sacrifice themselves for a higher cause. In today’s parlance, he would be called a “realist.”

Last but not least, this is, as far as I can tell, a very good translation. My only objection is that, occasionally, it sounds too contemporary.

An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori (Trans. from the German by Philip Boehm). New York Review Books Classics (2011).

Having read Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, I knew I was in for a treat when I bought An Ermine in Czernopol. Like his other books, this one too is largely autobiographical, though it is written as if it were a novel. No doubt, for the sophisticated Rezzori, the current distinctions between “memoir” and “fiction” would have been laughable. In fact, in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the narrator states that he doesn’t differentiate between reality and fiction, and often mixes things from other people’s lives with his own. The unspecified genre of An Ermine in Czernopol is part of its originality, and not simply because it mixes memoir and fiction, but because of the way it does so: written in an apparently shapeless way, the narrative seems to be nothing more than the writer’s random memories. For example, when he introduces a character and sketches the role (s)he will play in the story, he also tells us how that character will end. He is not concerned at all with what passes for one of the main rules of storytelling, suspense. At a closer look, however, it becomes clear that the each chapter is centered on a specific character. The shapelessness is only an illusion created by the author, who instead of unspooling a single thread has constructed his story in many layers.

Like Rezzori’s other books, An Ermine in Czernopol is set in his native province of Bucovina. Bucovina had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 (a few years after Rezzori’s birth) when it was added to Romania, and it now belongs to Ukraine. The portraits Rezzori draws of the particular species of individuals living in the province of Bucovina in the 1920s are the best representation of his genius. Having lived in Romania—albeit at a very different historical time—I can testify that this species, for which wit was at the top of hierarchical values and “lowliness was never a fault,” is not simply a fantastical creation of a writer with great imagination: it does exist. However, the amazing world of Czernopol—with its mixture of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Gypsies, Romanians, and other ethnicities that are now extinguished, such as the Ruthens (most of them peasants who lived in a very traditional way)—has disappeared. Czernopol is a barely veiled version of Cernautzi (its Romanian name—Cernivtsi in Ukrainian, Chernovtsy in Russian and Czernowitz in German and Yiddish). In fact, in one instance the writer slips and calls the city by its real name. The city is brought to life with a descriptive power unequaled in anything else I’ve read.

The main character here being the city itself, the “plot” of the “story” is almost irrelevant. But there is a plot, which is narrated in the voice of a child (presumably, young Rezzori), though the voice doesn’t have the “innocence” one usually associates with childhood, but rather the wisdom and knowledge of adulthood. The child gains this knowledge in a series of narrations by other characters with whom he comes in contact. The pronoun used by Rezzori is “we”—a curious choice, which sometimes includes the narrator’s sister, Tanya, but at other times is hard to explain. Who is “we”? Its usage is reminiscent of the French impersonal pronoun on, which often appears in Proust (with whom Rezzori has much in common). Like Proust, Rezzori often starts a sentence by describing the feeling of his protagonist, and then turns it into a generalization about human beings. The grammatical shift (to “we” or on) allows the story to move from the particular to the universal, and thus to acquire the power of myth.

What could be called the book’s plot is what the child hears and patches together from the adults around him. Tildy, a major of Hungarian (and possibly German) origin, who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army and is now enlisted in the nationalist Romanian army, is the main character. He is the symbol of the now defunct Empire, but also of a system of values that are absent in Czernopol: honor and a high sense of justice. He also happens to be the ideal physical representation of what today we would call a role model for the child-narrator. A handsome, mysterious hussar, Tildy always acts in accordance with an aristocratic code of values for which the city of Czernopol, which only values wit and laughter, has no use.

The underlying social and historical context may be difficult for an American reader to understand because of the complicated ethnic relations in the Bucovina of that era. To oversimplify, Tildy is to a large extent the victim of Romanian nationalism. But, like all heroes, he is also the victim of something that belongs only to him (call it “greatness”) and sets him apart from the society in which he lives. Married to Tamara, a woman just as enigmatic as he, and who suffers, apparently, from a combination of depression and drug abuse, he challenges to a duel a series of Romanians who have insulted both his wife and sister-in-law. The latter is another fascinating character, a beautiful woman who, in spite of being married, is extremely “generous” to all the males in town. For defending the honor of these women, to the people of Czernopol Major Tildy is a fool without a sense of humor. To the narrator Tildy is a character from a vanished world who, in a town like Czernopol, can only meet a tragic end.

The final chapter, “Love and Death of the Ermine,” is masterly in the way it shows Tildy’s demise not as heroic but as pure grotesque. In a city in which the conflict between the hero and the others is a conflict between two systems of a different nature (justice, an ethical value, and wit, an esthetic value), the result can only be grotesque. And the only way the tragic could manifest itself in an amoral city (that is, a city that opposes to the idea of justice the idea of wit) is through the grotesque.

The chapter takes place in a cheap dive with the pretentious and ridiculous name “Etablissement Mon Repos.” Here, Major Tildy and his brother-in-law (a former Professor of Latin who is an alcoholic) drown their sorrows in the company of a young prostitute, Mititika (“the Little One”). The description of this prostitute, the mixture of cheapness and vulgarity but also of beauty and innocence, and of her interaction with Tildy is extraordinary. They fall in love, but this love is as grotesque as its setting. In the morning, as they walk together with the drunken brother-in-law who keeps quoting Latin authors, Tildy saves him from an oncoming streetcar with broken brakes and Tildy is killed. The novel ends, symbolically, with the scene of his body covered by the prostitute’s ermine coat, whose whiteness is soon soaked in blood.

Gregor von Rezzori may be the greatest writer you’ve never heard of.

(Modern Library, 1994; 1st pub. 1934)

I owe my acquaintance with Isak Dinesen to Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume. This is how I found out that Dinesen is the pen name of Danish Baroness Blixen, who wrote in English and lived most of her life in Kenya (she is the author of the famous Out of Africa).

I haven’t read any other book by Dinesen, but Seven Gothic Tales is one of the most extraordinary collections of stories and novellas I have ever read. It is very rare for a writer to display such a masterful combination of skills: imagination, analytical powers and style.

Most of the stories take place in the early nineteenth-century, and are framed in the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, but their atmosphere is reminiscent of Poe, and the writer’s insights are in the best tradition of the psychological novel. Add to this Dinesen’t ability to make puns in three languages—English, French and German, and sometimes a combination of the above—plus her razor-sharp wit, and you will have an idea of her extreme originality. Even more impressive is her ability to take the stories in the most unexpected directions. Often, when we read fiction, we know more or less where the writer is going. With Dinesen it is impossible to predict how a story will end.

Confusion by Stefan Zweig (Trans. from the German by Anthea Bell. Intro by George Prochnik). NYRB, 2012.

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki (Trans. from the Japanese by Meredith McKinney). Penguin Books, 2010.

I don’t know about you, but when I read I encounter synchronicities about as often as I do in real life. I happened to read Confusion by Stefan Zweig immediately after having read Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, and the similarities between these books are uncanny. They are all the more unexpected considering that the former is a novella published in 1927 by an Austrian writer, and the second a novel published in 1914 by a Japanese writer.

Both books have three main characters: the narrator—a young man who is a student; the narrator’s friend—an elder who, in Confusion, is the narrator’s teacher, and in Kokoro, although not a teacher per se, is the narrator’s mentor and is called (by the narrator) “Sensei” (i.e., “teacher” in Japanese); and the friend’s/teacher’s wife. Both stories consist in the narrator’s ruminations about a “secret” his teacher/friend seems to have. In both, there are numerous dialogues between the wife and the young narrator whose main topic is the mysterious teacher—an enigmatic character the young narrator attempts to decipher. Even the titles have similar connotations: in Japanese, “kokoro” means both “heart” and “mind,” and its use by the narrator appears to indicate his emotional and mental confusion regarding his friend.

But the endings couldn’t be more different, and one could say that they are emblematic: in Kokoro, the “secret” has to do with a shameful act Sensei had committed in his youth; in Confusion, shame is also associated with the secret, but it is—of course!—of a sexual nature (let’s not forget, this is the period when Zweig’s compatriot, Freud, is at the peak of his career). Another difference is stylistic: Kokoro is written in a simple, straightforward way; Confusion, on the other hand, in Anthea Bell’s masterful translation, is one of Zweig’s best stylistic accomplishments.

Both stories are rather slow and monotonous, but it is a pleasant monotony, like the purring of a cat.

The Guinea Pigs by Ludvík Vaculík (Trans. from the Czech by Káca Polácková. Open Letter, 2011)

I was familiar with Open Letter’s commitment to translation, but I hadn’t seen their books until recently. I can now state that next to Archipelago Books (another publisher specialized in literature in translation) Open Letter publishes the most beautifully designed books in this country. The covers have a sober elegance that few books have in the current environment in which publishers seem to compete for the gaudiest packaging possible. Everything—the font, the covers, the description on the back cover—is tasteful. The only criticism I would have for the novel I recently bought, The Guinea Pigs by the Czech writer Ludvík Vaculík, is that the original publication date, 1973, isn’t specified in the author’s bio. The date is important considering that the author was one of the literary voices of the Prague Spring in 1968, and that the novel was written during that particular era in Eastern European history.

Written as if it were addressed to children, the novel uses this rhetoric strategy to explain the meaning of various “scientific” terms, and embraces a pseudo-scientific tone when describing the details of the narrator’s experiments on his guinea pigs. The narrator is a father of two young boys who works at a state bank in Prague, where he observes and participates in what for an American reader might be an act of sabotage of the bank. For an Eastern European reader, however, the narrator simply does what everybody else did at the time: steals from his workplace in order to survive. The description of the numerous absurdities of the Communist regime—which is never mentioned as such—combined with the dialogues between father and sons and the “objective” description of the guinea pigs create a hilarious effect.

The most intriguing aspect of the novel is the narrator’s relationship with his guinea pigs. Whether one reads the book at a literal level—as a novel about a Czech family in the seventies and its cute guinea pigs—or as a metaphor about a political system in which the citizens are treated like guinea pigs, The Guinea Pigs makes for a very entertaining (and educational!) reading.