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

Not having grown up in this country, I haven't read many American classics; so, every now and then I discover some great writer I should have read a long time ago. One such writer is Sherwood Anderson, whose book, Winesburg, Ohio, I just finished. From the back cover, one (especially one like me) can find out that this book has had a huge influence on Faulkner, Fitzgerald and, generally, on the American short story. It is hard to add up this statement with what these days we are told are the “rules” for writing a short story, since Anderson’s stories don’t obey most of these rules.

To begin with, his stories have a certain shapelessness, as if they were unfinished, or as if they were merely drafts. This impression is enhanced by the way he introduces some of the characters, who have an episodic appearance, and then disappear. Of course, this being a collection of linked stories, the episodic appearance of some of the characters is justified; but I would say that in Anderson’s stories, the accidental and the episodic are part of the ethos itself of his world. I’ve encountered something similar in Gogol: the author would mention and briefly describe a character, who would then never appear again. According to the most basic “rules” of fiction writing, this is a no-no; that is, if you think fiction is written according to rules. But if you are Sherwood Anderson or Gogol you are just creating a world—which, as any creation, is unfinished. It is also part of the essence of modernity to let the reader sense the “artifice” of the story, as if the latter were a sculpture whose clay hasn’t entirely dried, and if you wanted, you could reshape it into a different form. It is a feeling you often have in reading these stories.

But all of the above doesn’t, really, say much about these stories. What makes them so powerful, in the end, is the humanity of the characters, who, in their grotesqueness, are still extremely touching. Anderson is a master at taking “simple people” and at looking at them in a way that, suddenly, makes them very “queer.” It is a world of weird people who are all very normal. Many of the characters are young men and women who long to be loved, but who are too shy to express their feelings—nothing more normal than that. But under Anderson’s pen, these people attain a grotesqueness that is the grotesqueness of life itself: a youth hugging a pillow and whispering love words to it, or walking on Main Street talking to himself and thinking about doing something “big,” and then being humiliated by some other, similarly clumsy youth; or an older man who has “ideas” that he can’t stop sharing with everyone; or an older woman whose life has passed by, and who suddenly metamorphoses into her younger self before dying, and is finally seen by her own son as the young woman he never knew.

The book starts with a “framing story” about an old writer who has written a Book of the Grotesque. The grotesque is, of course, the aesthetic underlying Winseburg, Ohio insofar as the grotesque is a representation of something strange and exaggerated, but which can still trigger one’s empathy.

Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy (NYRB, trans. from the Hungarian by John Bátki, introduction by John Lukacs)

Krúdy has been hailed by his fellow Hungarians as not only one of the greatest Hungarian writers, but maybe the greatest. He has been compared to Robert Walser and Bruno Schulz because, like them, he is unclassifiable, and his greatness has been described by Sándor Márai as “almost past comprehension.” Given all the above, the reader may be slightly disappointed by his novel, Sunflower (written in 1918 and published for the first time in English in 1997). Lukacs’s introduction warns us about the difficulties to translate Krúdy’s poetic prose not only because of his style, but also because of the hidden allusions (cultural, historical) that only a Hungarian can understand. With an ambiguous formulation, he tells the reader that the translator “has tried” and “largely succeeded.”

As I read the book, I tried to find in my mind literary equivalents for it, and the only one I came up with was Craii de Curtea Veche by the Romanian writer Mateiu Caragiale, a novel written around the same time and hailed by Romanian writers as an unequaled masterpiece. What these books have in common, aside from a poetic, archaic style, is an atmosphere of fin-de-siècle, of a gone world that the narrators are trying to bring back through the power of words. The world they describe and which triggers their nostalgia is one in which men drink their fill and reminisce about past lovers—in other words, a world that is itself prone to nostalgic remembrance. In this world, the inn is the emblematic space of dramatic encounters, a microcosm from which stories about other worlds unspool, where an old woman spotted at a nearby table triggers a long story about a bygone beauty and the drama that had once surrounded her. This nostalgia about nostalgia creates a dreamlike universe, but this universe is far from being depicted as some kind of idyllic space; on the contrary, there is a crudeness and even an ugliness to the people in it. The apparent contradiction between this nostalgia and the world that is its object makes me think that these two authors may be impossible to translate for an American audience.

And this brings me to the issue of translation, and to whether translating a book from a very different culture and historical time is possible. In this case, I think the answer is no, not because translating the author’s words might be impossible. What is impossible to translate is what the author hasn’t said, and which is, nevertheless, present in the book: a sensibility circumscribed to a certain culture and historical time. The idea of a bygone world and the accompanying nostalgia may be to some degree universal (in American literature, Gone with the Wind is a great example), but what differentiates an American and a Hungarian is that loss gives the latter a perverse pleasure. Compare the spirit of Scarlet O’Hara who, undeterred by all she’s lost, declares courageously, “Tomorrow is another day,” hopeful that she can start all over again, to Krúdy’s characters who will do tomorrow what they are doing today: reminisce about yesterday.

Add to the above the fact that, unlike most novels, Krudy’s novel has several centers from which radiate several stories. For the first half, a woman, Eveline, seems to be the main protagonist, but then, the focus shifts to her neighbor, Pistoli, who becomes the main character. Pistoli is the incarnation of the “old Hungary” whose loss the narrator (and the author) deplores, and with whom most American readers, especially women, would find it hard to identify: an ugly yet impressive man, presumably in his sixties, who venerates the bottle, takes himself for a philosopher (and doesn’t spare the reader his numerous “witticisms”), thinks with nostalgia about the dozens of mistresses from his past, and sometimes visits his former wives, now locked up (by him) in mental institutions. On the other hand, the mating dance of cruelty between Pistoli and Miss Maszkeradi, a wild woman and feminist avant la lettre, is fascinating, as is the relationship between her friend, the suave Eveline and her suitor, Andor Almos-Dreamer (who is, indeed, a dreamer). The novel doesn’t have a plot per se, but a series of events, which don’t really develop toward a climax; rather, they go up and down, and right and left until Pistoli’s death restores a lost equilibrium and brings some hope for the future of Eveline and Almos-Dreamer.

Dezsö Kosztolányi, The Plaster Angel (Noran Libro Kiadó, 2010. Trans. from the Hungarian by Eszter Molnár. Ed. by Peter Doherty)

Some of the best books I ever read are books I discovered on my own, either in a library or a bookstore. In fact, half of the pleasure of reading comes, as far as I am concerned, from the surprise of the discovery, which is why I hate the Internet-based paradigm of “if you liked X, then you might like Y”). Venturing into a bookstore is one of the greatest pleasures of travel for me, even if the books are in languages I don’t read.

This summer I entered a small bookstore in Budapest, and discovered a bilingual edition of Dezsö Kosztolányi’s The Plaster Angel, which includes twenty short stories written as early as 1908. I had read two novels of his translated into English, Skylark and Kornél Esti, plus a novella in French, and he already was on my list of great unknown 20th century European writers, so it was with great joy that I grabbed the book off the shelf, and with even greater joy that I took in its French covers and, after a brief inspection, decided that the translation was professionally done.

A few stories about handicapped people—such as the one in which a “poor little invalid” tortures everyone around him with his demands—bring to mind the complex psychology of Stefan Zweig; others, like “The Fat Judge,” “Feri” and “The Swim” have the quiet soulfulness of Chekhov’s stories; others, like “Heart,” in which the demand of a rich widow to have her heart stabbed with a knife after her death, or “Order” about a man who is so obsessed with order that when his wife changes the position of his armchair, he takes the pistol and shoots her, and later, in the ambulance, he is so disturbed by the esthetic asymmetry that he asks the doctor “to sit parallel with him”!—these stories display typical Eastern European dark humor and an absurdist wit reminiscent of Gogol. And then, there are stories with a hint of postmodern wit avant la lettre, such as “The Wondrous Visitation of KH,” in which a young man who wishes to see again his deceased lover has his wish granted, but realizes that they have nothing to tell each other; or “A Robber,” in which a young man who decides to commit his first robbery ends up applying first aid to the woman he had intended to rob: “All in all he was a very untalented robber.” In “The Liars,” a family of creative and imaginative people transforms reality (in which the father is a charming crook) into a magic world reminding us of Steven Millhauser.

I'd like to end with a quote from Kosztolányi’s fellow writer, Sándor Márai. Márai, who had enormous admiration for Kosztolányi, had met him in Budapest, and wrote about him and the world they shared and which disappeared after WWII:

“Kosztolányi and his contemporaries still perceived something different under the entry-word “Literature” than do those writing today. For them literature was simultaneously play and ritual, conspiracy and craft, Eleusinian rite and complicitous pact sealed with blood.” (Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary 19441948. Trans. by Albert Tezla. Budapest: Corvina Books and Central European University Press, 1996)

Most of O Hara’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, giving birth to a certain type of story that we now associate with the magazine. Though I am not a fan of this type of story, I find O’Hara’s stories among the most entertaining I’ve ever read.

Having worked as a journalist, the skills accumulated while reporting real facts have served him well and have helped him create punchy, fact-based stories often inspired by overheard conversations. An O’Hara story is often like a play, in that the setting is circumscribed, the period of time in which the events take place is very short (a day or even a few hours), and it sometimes starts and/or ends with dialogue. O’Hara’s characters are from all the walks of life—bartenders, showgirls, cops, doctors, widows (more or less wealthy), drunks, actors—and one can tell that he has a deep knowledge of all the American class structures. But the most idiosyncratic characteristic of his stories is that his characters are defined by/through their voices and way of speaking. His dialogues are so vivid and life-like, that even when you don’t know almost anything about his characters, you can see them. Some of the stories in this collection are nothing more than dialogues between a husband and a wife, or a man and a woman who have just met—but they draw you in from the first line. One of O’Hara’s techniques is to start a story in the middle of an ongoing dialogue, which makes the reader curious to find out the missing piece of information. Another technique is an intriguing, mysterious ending.

Some examples of O’Hara beginnings: “The alarm clock went off and she did not remember setting it.” (“The Assistant); “The famous actress went to the window and gazed down at the snow-covered park.” (“Can I Stay Here?”); “Miller was putting his key in the lock.” (“Good-Bye, Herman”); and some endings: “She knew it [her lawyer’s phone number] by heart.” (“The Assistant”); “‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Me’.” (“It’s Mental Work”).

More than fifty years after its publication in Turkey and its author’s death, the 400-page novel The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar is available in English for the first time. Let me start by praising its translators, Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, who, judging from the novel’s intricate content and stylistic complexity, have had to overcome tremendous difficulties, and have done it brilliantly. This novel is a masterpiece not only in Turkish, but also in English, which means that the translators deserve as much praise as the original author.

Because of its numerous subplots, it’s very hard to summarize this novel, but let me try: at the beginning, the narrator, Hayri Irdal, reveals that his life has taken a different turn when he met “his benefactor,” Halit Ayarci, and became associated with the “Time Regulation Institute.” After this revelation, the narrative switches back to the narrator’s childhood. As a child, he was fascinated with watches and clocks, and was lucky enough to learn everything about them from one of those wise men of humble origins that any neighborhood used to have in the old days: Nuri Efendi. The descriptions of various types of watches and clocks are among the most beautiful pages in the book, lyrical and funny at the same time, infused with nostalgia for outmoded mechanics/technology and insights on different views of time. The grandfather clock that the narrator’s family owns, ironically called “the Blessed One,” plays an important part—among other things, it serves as a virtual prop when the narrator undergoes psychoanalysis with Dr. Ramiz.

How did Hayri—a poor, simple man—come to be psychoanalyzed? Well, he was taken to court because he was accused of having stolen a diamond (a diamond that didn’t really exist) and in order to determine whether or not he was sane, the court sent him to a doctor, who, as luck would have it, had studied in Vienna. It was Dr. Ramiz who later introduced Hayri to his circle of friends in a bohemian café, and through some of them Hayri became involved with the “Spiritualist Society.” Although Tanpinar satirizes these circles and fads that were fashionable in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, the satire is colorful and humorous, and the people described are very charming; far from being moralized, the reader is drawn into a magical world.

The “Time Regulation Institute” is the creation of Halit Ayarci, the prototype of the modern man who believes that work necessarily takes places in an office and that anyone who performs “real work” has, or should have, a modern (that is, “regulated”) vision of time. Western readers may not necessarily recognize in this institute an allegory of bureaucratic societies, especially since its hundreds of employees don’t do anything (as absurd as modern societies may be, they do appreciate one thing: efficiency!). Every once in a while some important official (such as the mayor) drops by to visit this important institute whose function is to make sure that all the watches and clocks in the city are set properly. It should be added, though, that the satire (or allegory, as some critics have called it) is very complex, and that Tanpinar is too good a writer to give us simply a black and white image. He is a master stylist, and The Time Regulation Institute is one of the most beautifully written and interesting novels of mid-twentieth-century (when it was first published).