Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "communism"

Duo Duo (b. 1951), one of the most important contemporary Chinese poets, is from a generation that witnessed the persecution of its parents—intellectuals qualified as “degenerate bourgeois” by the communists—and came of age during Mao’s so-called “Cultural Revolution,” when these intellectuals and bourgeois were exiled to the countryside to do manual labor. After the crush of Tiananmen Square in 1989 Duo Duo lived in Europe for fifteen years, and then returned to China. These two very different experiences are, obviously, present in his writings. A newly released translation from Zephyr Press (trans. by John Crespi), Snow Plain, includes translations of six short stories written in the 1980s and 90s, some set in China, some in Britain and Canada. The stories set in China are far better, as they exude a certain strangeness the other stories don’t have. “Sumo” and “The Day I Got to Xi’An” are among the strangest stories I’ve ever read. It’s hard to find an equivalent in Western literature, as their strangeness is different than, say, Kafka’s. “Sumo” is vaguely reminiscent of Robbe-Grillet’s “Last Year in Marienbad”—except much better. The only writer with a comparable style is another contemporary Chinese author, Gao Xingjian (winner of the Nobel Prize).

Although I am a strong believer in the power of the imagination, I also believe that good literature can only be born in an environment that gives us the elements necessary to transmute them into something else. A (good) writer doesn’t simply copy reality, but (s)he can’t entirely reinvent it either. What I am trying to get at is this: if, in a society, all the writers are teaching creative writing, the reality they work with is, by force of circumstance, impoverished. True, this impoverishment is due to more than one factor: one could say that the sterile, aseptic lives most of us live in Western societies—spending most of our time in front of a screen—aren't conducive to creating great works of art; of course, one could also say the opposite: that a sterile environment may trigger in us the desire to create a different world than the one we live in. No matter, one need only read literature in translation from non-Western countries to realize that the flesh of the real and the touch of history do play a role in artistic creation.

Having said this, I would rather spend all my life in an office than live in Su Tong’s China where there is no escape from history. The narrative takes place, as far as I could tell (since there are no dates) in the late seventies, in post-Maoist China. The setting: a fishing village where the population is divided into the boat people and those on the shore. The main character is a teenager—and later a young man—nicknamed Kongpi from “kong,” empty, and “pi,” ass (not the most popular boy in town). The boy and his father end up among the boat people when the father, who had been a Party Secretary, falls out of favor with the local nomenklatura. His disgrace is the result of a tragic-comic situation: having been considered until then the son of a local revolutionary-martyr (that is, a young woman who had been killed by the previous regime, and as a consequence, had been transformed into the closest equivalent to a saint—she is the object of a cult and her sculpted likeness is guarded as a precious relic), he is now declared a fraud. This ritual of a fall from grace, all too common in communism, is subjected to a sarcastic scrutiny by Su Tong: the proof of the father’s claim to fame (as the martyr’s son) is the fish-shaped birthmark on his behind. Once he is declared a fraud, no matter how often does the poor man drop his pants down to show the proof, no one believes him any more. Not only that, but, after having been unfaithful for many years, he loses his wife too. And the solution he ultimately finds to his overpowering sexual urges is…to cut off his penis. Young Kongpi himself, who has inherited his father’s urges, struggles for the entire novel with his undisciplined penis, which has a tendency to stand erect at the most inauspicious moments.

This is the background on which appears Huixian, a charming, clever nine-year-old girl, who is adopted by the boat people, and who becomes the object of Kongpi’s most secret desires. The girl turns into a beautiful young woman, who, for some time, seems to have a great future as an actress performing a Communist revolutionary, until she too, falls from grace. Huixian’s character is, actually, very complex, as this woman changes from a powerful diva into a cheap conformist, and from a beautiful woman into the closest equivalent to a redneck (she spends most of her time cracking melon seeds). Kongpi’s adventures too are endless, and one could almost call him a picaresque hero. This is an extremely captivating novel, and the translator, Howard Goldblatt, deserves special credit for an impressive translation.

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

I don’t know about you, but as I grow older, I rarely read a book with the total abandonment I used to experience as a child or a teenager. Olga Grushin, a young(ish) American writer who emigrated from Russia at eighteen, must have some special powers in order to cast this spell with both her novels, The Line and The Dream Life of Sukhanov.

The first thing that separates Grushin’s novels from those written by her American contemporaries is that, unlike them, she is still interested in something called “the human condition.” I am always puzzled by the fact that, while apparently political, most (relatively) young American writers, don’t integrate this interest into something one might call “our universal condition.” But then, how could they, when those of them who are in academia, are taught to run away from notions of the “universal” as if they were plague? On the other hand, many writers who integrate a contemporary political experience into their writings—usually poets—do this in such a righteous, sloganeering way that one is instantly tempted to become apolitical. I am thinking here of the numerous bad poems simmering with righteous indignation at W. Bush that I had to listen to during endless poetry readings.

All this to say that it may take a writer who has actually lived in a country where one couldn’t run away from politics, where every gesture ended up being political whether one was aware of it or not, to write in a mature way about the individual versus the collective, the singular versus the universal, fate versus will, and the relationship between the individual destiny and history. One cannot deal with such subjects when one has that nihilist ironic tone many contemporary American writers feel obligated to exhibit.

The historical background of The Dream Life of Sukhanov is that of Russia between the 1930s and the 1980s. The protagonist is the director of the main arts magazine in Moscow, and son-in-law of the most famous painter of day. Both titles implied a privileged position under communism, since one couldn’t get them without bowing to the Communist Party, and they came with numerous perks: access to special stores of the nomenklatura, a private chauffeur, etc.

Little by little, the reader is drawn into the hero’s dream life, and finds out that he had grown up in poverty and fear, having witnessed the killings of the Stalinist era and his father’s suicide. As a young man he fell in love with surrealism, and despised the official rhetoric and the socialist realist paintings depicting optimist laborers singing the beauty of their tractors. And then, one day he had to choose between continuing to be a poor, unrecognized painter, faithful to his ideals, and selling out to those in power in order to provide for his family.

At the heart of the novel is the choice, or rather, the question: what would you do if you had to choose? Sukhanov has to choose between killing the artist in himself and collaborating with the regime, on one hand, and keeping his artistic integrity, but having to survive by doing hard, low paid jobs, on the other hand. But choosing the latter also means committing suicide as an artist, since he wouldn’t be able to exhibit his paintings, and what good is a painting without a viewer?

In appearance, the novel gives us the story of a man who has betrayed his youth, but the closer we get to the end, the more we realize that the novel doesn’t have any easy answers, and that whatever the man would have chosen, he would have failed. At the end of the novel, a character introduced in the very first pages reappears: Sukhanov’s friend, Belkin, who had taken the opposite path, that of artistic honesty and everyday misery. Belkin, who is poor and whose wife has left him, finally gets his first show when he is in his mid-fifties, but then he realizes that he is a mediocre painter.

Until his world suddenly unravels, Sukhanov is rich, happily married to a gorgeous woman, respected (or rather, feared) by those in his profession. In the end, his entire world falls apart, and although as readers we know that he is justly punished, the author doesn’t give us a straight answer regarding the better choice. As Sukhanov’s wife says during their younger (and poorer) days, “There is more than one way to lose one’s soul.”

This is an extremely mature novel, and it is amazing that a writer who left Russia at such a young age can recreate so well not only the people’s daily lives and the country’s atmosphere, but the existential choices communism imposed on people. As rooted as the novel is in a particular time and place, this very anchoring makes it universal insofar as in many ways we are all products of our choices. Last but not least, Olga Grushin is a great stylist, and her paragraphs on art are among the best in the novel.

The Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, and its sequel, The Golden Calf, have enjoyed an immense popularity in Russia and Eastern Europe. I had read (and greatly enjoyed) The Golden Calf many years ago in Romanian, and as a consequence, I was very excited by the recent publication of a new English translation of The Twelve Chairs (Northwestern, 2011, translated from the Russian by Anne O. Fisher). I wondered, however, whether a satirical Russian novel set in 1927 and published a year later could be understood by a contemporary American reader. Now that I read all its 500 plus pages, I can say that, surprisingly, the answer is yes. The American reader won’t understand all the references, of course, but most of the humor is fairly universal.

The plot is set in motion by the confession of Ippolit Matveevich Vorobyaninov’s mother-in-law on her deathbed: before the Soviet regime forced them out of their home she’d managed to hide her jewels, including her diamonds, in one of the twelve upholstered chairs that were part of a Gambs furniture set. All their possessions, including the chairs, were confiscated by the regime and allocated to various individuals and institutions. The problem is that the woman confessed to both her son-in-law and Father Fyodor, so both of them set out on a journey across the Soviet state, during which their paths sometimes cross, causing hilarious encounters. Vorobyninov is accompanied by Ostap Bender, “the smooth operator,” a self-appointed “technical director” who is one of the greatest crooks in the history of literature (a more vulgar version of Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull). The tragicomic demise of Father Fyodor is paralleled by the absolutely unexpected ending of the novel and of the diamond search. I won’t reveal it here, but suffice it to say that the Communist censors might have had something to do with it.

This journey across nations, cities, mountains and sea(s) allows the writers to depict all the social strata of Soviet society, and to give the reader a good understanding of its functioning in the 1920s. This novel proves, once again, that reading literature is the best way to understand history. Thanks should be given to Anne O. Fischer for her (mostly successful) effort to translate this huge and difficult novel, and for the research she’s done in the process. The book has a long, helpful and non-intrusive list of notes at the end.

[This is not the edition I read, but the link to the new edition is broken]

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.

Having grown up in a communist country, I am skeptical when it comes to successful novels about communism written by writers that haven’t experienced it firsthand. That’s why even before I checked to see if Sofi Oksanen has grown up in Estonia, where her novel takes place, I suspected she hasn’t. It turns out she is Estonian on her mother’s side, but born in Finland. This is not to say that Oksanen’s novel isn’t good: it is a very well written, suspenseful novel—but written for a Western audience and with a somewhat Western sensibility (in the same way the movie The Lives of Others about East Germany under communism was directed by a young German with training in Hollywood).

Purge moves between two periods: the one when the communists took power in Estonia after WWII, which coincided with the Soviet takeover (1946-the early fifties); and the post-communist years (1991-1992) when Estonia conquered its independence and began its transition toward a free market. The character making the connection between the two eras is an elderly, widowed woman, Aliide, who becomes the accidental host of a Russian young girl in need of help, Zara. The girl is hiding from two men who forced her into prostitution after she left Vladivostok (Russia) to work in West Germany in 1991.

It turns out that Zara didn’t stumble by accident in Aliide’s home: she had her address from her grandmother, a woman of Estonian origin, who, before the girl left for Germany, revealed that she had a sister in Estonia (who is, of course, Aliide). And so, we plunge into Aliide’s past and find out how, after having been tortured and raped by the new communist authorities (a fate her sister, and apparently, her seven-year old niece, i.e., Zara’s mother, have also endured) she is forced to become a collaborator (a common practice in communism). Eventually, she marries a communist (whose surprising past is revealed at the end of the novel in an appendix of “top secret” files). After her sister and her daughter (Zara’s future mother) are sent to Siberia, Aliide and her husband move into the freed house, which also serves (unbeknown to Aliide’s husband) as a hiding place for Aliide’s brother-in-law, with whom she is secretly in love.

Although Zara knows who Aliide is, she is unaware of her (and her own family’s) past; on the other hand, Aliide doesn’t know until the end that Zara is her relative, but knows that they have in common a history of surviving male violence. The ending is surprising and, although cathartic, not very plausible. I won’t give it away, but I’ll say that it involves a gun (there is no way that anyone, especially an old babushka, could have owned a gun during communism). There are some other details that bother me, but very likely, they are only noticeable by people like me: besides the gun, I would mention the rape of a seven-year-old, which to me, and probably to most people who’ve grown up in a communist country, seems like a gratuitous addition meant for Western audiences: throw in a scene with a raped child, and everybody will be disgusted with the evil done by the communists. The communists deserve to be accused of many evil things, but the rape of children was not one of them. Nevertheless, the novel is a great read, its best parts being those that describe Aliide in her kitchen, or those dealing with (her) fear. Fear, that feeling specific to dictatorships, is something Oksanen understands and knows how to convey. A good lesson in history, Purge is a novel definitely worth reading.

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