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

How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone has an unusual structure: it is divided into two parts, the first one with the same title as the novel, the second titled “When Everything Was All Right” and authored by Aleksandar Krsmanovic, the novel’s narrator (and, obviously, an alter ego of Sasa Stanisic). This is not a story within a story, but rather, two twin stories, as both tell the story of a young boy growing up in a small Bosnian village in post-Tito Communist Yugoslavia.

Stanisic’s novel is not written according to the structure of a gradually thickening plot; rather, it is a chronicle of a world about to be swept off by history. The chapters focused on the life before the war seem taken from a film by the French director Tati, revealing a series of picturesque characters and their daily interactions. Aleksandar’s grandfather, the main object of the narrator’s affection, a charming old man very likely based on the author’s own grandfather, happens to be a Communist who holds some title in the local Party nomenklatura. Interestingly, unlike writers from older generations, Stanisic doesn’t seem very critical of Communism, probably because in comparison with the hell that followed, it was “all right.”

There are parts in the novel, especially at the beginning, that made me feel ambivalent about it: on the one hand, Stanisic is, undeniably, a very talented writer, and his characters are extremely vivid; on the other, there is a certain…cuteness in the description of this old world (justified, in part, by the fact that the book is written in the voice of a thirteen-year-old) that I sometimes found off-putting.

In 1991 the villagers’ life (which, in retrospect, appears idyllic) is disrupted by the unthinkable: war. Once the war beings, the narration acquires a raw authenticity that makes it (and not only in my opinion) one of the best works on war in modern literature. Although I am a strong believer in the power of imagination, I think that there are certain extreme events that one can only write about in an authentic way if one has experienced them, and war is one of them. This is not because one cannot imagine war, but because often, when representing such extreme situations, writers tend to transform them into something spectacular (in all the senses of this word), and therefore ob-scene (a spectacle made to be shown on stage). There are numerous accounts of contemporary tragedies that revel in their bloodiness, usually written by authors who haven’t witnessed them.

Stanisic’s honesty, combined with his gift for storytelling (by which I mean the telling of a story in a way bards used to do it, that is, an account informed by orality) give the novel a poignant immediacy. There is a chapter describing a soccer game during the war, when, apparently, the Serbian army and the Territorials (i.e, the Bosnian army) used to play in opposite teams during brief cease-fire breaks. Nowhere else is the absurdity of war more evident than when the soldiers stop the carnage against each other to play together, and afterward go back to killing each other. The chapter describing this absurd game, at the end of which the Serbian leader orders a bloodbath—breaking the rules of the game—is extraordinary.

If one takes into account that Stanicic published this novel at 28 in his second language, German, one can predict a great future for this young writer.

War and War by László Krasznahorkai (Trans. from the Hungarian by George Szirtes. New Directions, 2006)

László Krasznahorkai is not an easy author. I am saying this as a lover of Proust (with whom LK has in common those long, twisted sentences) and of Sebald (with whom he shares a gloomy mood and the ability to write fiction by creating a reality-effect via, for example, photos of real objects; incidentally, Sebald was one of the first writers to recognize LK’s genius). But what Krasznahorkai doesn’t have in common with Proust is the latter’s “soft” side, his ruminations on the human heart, and his repetitive love triangles in which are rooted most of the dramatic conflicts in In Search of Lost Time. In fact, in LK’s world there are few women, which may be one of the reasons I find him not always very pleasant to read. But when he does portray women, the portraits are compelling, and perhaps not accidentally one of the most engaging—for me, at least—parts in War and War is the part in which the protagonist falls under the spell of a gorgeous stewardess.

I always believed that to present a novel trough its plot means not only to impoverish it, but to misrepresent it, and this is all the more true for War and War. But, for those interested, here is an attempt: Korin, who works in a records office in Budapest, and who has a PhD in history, finds a manuscript that is so beautifully written and strangely unintelligible that he decides to abandon his entire life, burn all his personal documents, save for his passport, and leave for “the center of the world,” New York. Initially, it is not clear what the relationship between this extraordinary document whose events take place several centuries ago in Italy, and contemporary New York is, and why Korin chooses New York as the location from where he launches the document into eternity via the Internet (when he could do that from anywhere in the world) and where he eventually commits suicide, but, toward the end it appears that the relationship is symbolic, New York being the center of a world system whose beginnings are sketched in the manuscript.

The inadequacy of framing the discussion about a serious piece of literature through a “plot description” is obvious here because the novel is not so much about what happens to Korin as it is about the manuscript. The manuscript tells the story of four friends who travel to Venice—which is described as the city of peace, that is, as a combination of beauty and intelligence—then to Genoa, the city whose genius consists in having invented “the exchanges and credits, the banknotes and the interest, in a word, the borsa generale,” that is, the very foundation of the world we still live in, in which we are no longer dependent “on an external reality, but on intellect alone.” In other words, the invention of the credit and the banking system (which has led to Wall Street) has “spiritualized” the world in the sense that it has made it more abstract. (LK’s reflection on this process of abstraction is concerned only with the notion of money, but it would have been even more interesting to read his thoughts on cyberspace).

The main idea of the novel—which is not spelled as such, but transpires in the very first scene when Korin is attacked by a mob of young thieves who want his money—is: money equals war/violence. As a reflection on war and peace, LK’s title is a deliberate rewriting of Tolstoy’s famous title. Peace is the greatest invention of humankind, says Krasznahorkai. If Venice is the city of peace, Genoa, the city of money, is the city of war. If, in Tolstoy’s world, humanity lived between war and peace, in Krasznahorkai’s world (the world of the new “spiritualized” order) we are caught between war and war—hence, no possibility of hope; hence, the protagonist’s suicide.

But the most powerful aspect of LK’s novel is the unfolding of his enormous sentences, an unfolding best described by the author himself when he comments on the manuscript’s style: “all part of a single monstrous, infernal, all-absorbing sentence that hits you…unreadable…insane…[and yet] extraordinarily beautiful…” Once again, we have to thank George Szirtes for rendering into English this extraordinary beauty.
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