Kevin Powers served in the US Army in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, and this novel draws on that experience. It’s a story about combat told by someone who was there. It needs to be approached with respect. And I did. I was repelled by some callous and/or confused anti-Islamic imagery in the first paragraph (‘The war tried to kill us in the spring … While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.’). But I read on.
The anti-Islam thing was clearly not deliberate. The narrative follows a small group of soldiers in Iraq – really just three characters. They do vile things, but they’re not triumphalist about it: this is what soldiers have to do, and they are pretty much as numb to the deaths of their comrades as to the enemies and the innocent bystanders they kill. There are flashbacks to home in rural Virginia. A terrible fate for one of them is foreshadowed. There’s a nasty scene in a brothel, a colonel who does what the narrator calls a ‘half-assed Patton imitation’, some clueless embedded journalists.
I had trouble believing any of it. I don’t for a moment think Powers is misrepresenting things. Certainly, there’s a fierce rejection of the sort of crypto-glamour of something like The Hurt Locker (I mean the movie – I haven’t read the book it draws on). I’m pretty sure he tackled some material that was unimaginably hard to face, and I admire him greatly for that. But nothing came alive for me, everything felt painfully constructed. I stopped reading at about page 90 when an embedded journalist was being a complete idiot.
So The Yellow Birds may be all the things that the distinguished writers quoted on its back cover say it is: ‘inexplicably beautiful and utterly, urgently necessary’, ‘born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence’, written ‘with a fierce and exact concentration and sense of truth’. It may, as one of them proclaims, be the All Quiet on the Western Front of America’s Arab Wars. Please don’t take my word against the combined judgement of Ann Patchett, Tom Wolfe, Colm Tóibín. Alice Sebold and more. As far as I read, I thought it was pretty good first novel on a very important subject, and hope Kevin Powers has a great writing career ahead of him.
Before the meeting: After Karl Ove Knausgaard’s mountains of mundane detail, we wanted our next book to be one that spins a great yarn. Someone proposed the sequel to Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, which we’d all enjoyed. There were no dissenting voices, so River of Smoke it was.
We’d forgotten that in his own way Ghosh is just as given to piling on the detail as Knausgaard. Especially in the first half of River of Smoke, hardly a paragraph is without its cluster of glittering facts or shiny words. A glossary would have to define a seemingly endless variety of boats, buildings, functionaries, items of clothing, financial processes, scientific equipment, dubious activities, plants, religious rituals and so on as they are named in Bengali and other Indian languages, Cantonese, Portuguese, Farsi, regional Englishes, Cantonese pidgin, Mauritian Kreol, and so on. And then there’s a wealth of historical anecdote: we see Napoleon at Longwood on St Helena; we hear of escaped slaves on Mauritius who committed mass suicide when they saw troops approaching their hiding place, unaware that the troops were coming to tell them that slavery had long since been abolished; we learn the origins of chai, and much much more. The effect isn’t intimidating: Amitav Ghosh is like a child let loose in a linguistic and historical lolly shop, and wants us to share his delight. The writer he most resembles in this love of the source material is Neal Stephenson.
As you would expect, River of Smoke starts out putting us back in touch with the main characters from Sea of Poppies. But pretty much as soon as they’ve been reintroduced most of them drop out of the picture, some never to be mentioned again, and those who remain gradually withdraw from centre stage to become relatively minor figures – the munshi (secretary cum newsgatherer) to a major character, the recipient of letters from another. The characters we engage with most strongly are new: Bahram Modi, a Parsi opium trader, and Robin Chinnery, artist, homosexual romantic and writer of long, flamboyant letters. Possibly the main character is fanqui-town, the brilliantly evoked, exhilaratingly diverse Babel on the edge of Canton where foreign traders were allowed to live and work in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The opium trade, whose viciousness was graphically evoked in the first book, is the most profitable activity of the fanquis, and the novel traces events leading up to the First Opium War in 1939: the Emperor is no longer turning a blind eye and a new, incorruptible man arrives in Canton to take definitive, dramatic action. According to Google the historical war didn’t turn out well for the Chinese and the trade continued for decades, but River of Smoke ends just before the war proper begins and that outcome isn’t at all obvious.
At the group meeting about Sea of Poppies, someone said he enjoyed the ripping yarn and learned a lot of history but wasn’t engaged in the way he wanted to be by a novel. For all its delights, River of Smoke was like that for me. The tension is real, the stakes are high, and I trust that I’m being told a true story – but sometimes it’s as if the novelist was swamped by his research and forgot that he cared about his characters. There are longish extracts from actual documents issued by the Chinese authorities and the fanqui opium traders, for example, which are fabulous to read, but leave our characters with little to do but react or comment from the sidelines.
Maybe the book suffers from the Middle Book Syndrome – in the first book the world and characters were new. In the third book we’ll find out how everything is resolved. In this one, we just have to get from Book One to Book Three. It’s a bridge rather than a stand-alone, and so not completely satisfying.
After the meeting: There were seven of us, of whom five had read the book.
Two people reported being on holiday and experiencing a powerful resistance to submitting to the world of the book – one ploughed on despite the resistance, the other followed his bliss after 20 pages or so.
The man who liked the book most described it – accurately – as very visual. At a level of simple pleasure it was the linguistic fireworks that appealed most to me. Someone else was most moved by the painful sense of history.
None of us were wildly enthusiastic about the epistolary chapters, tending to find the flamboyant Robin Chinnery a bit on the tiresome side.
Someone arrived with multiple tabs open on his iPad web browser: paintings of Canton’s foreign factories in the 18th and early 19th century, maps of historic Canton, etc. It turned out that a number of us had been to Wikipedia to look up the Opium Wars, and to see if various characters were real (many were). Amitav Ghosh’s web site has the Chrestomathy, mentioned in passing in the book, which is an odd linguistic document compiled in old age by Neel, the zemindar turned munshi who may well turn out to be the central character of the trilogy.
Attitudes to the as yet non-existent third volume ranged from eager anticipation to ‘meh’. I’m close to the eager anticipation end of that continuum.
[As I was about to upload this, I checked and found that Amitav Ghosh is on Twitter, which prompts two remarks. First, I hope Twitter isn’t distracting him from his writing, and if it is I apologise for adding to the distraction. Second, I was delighted to see that someone on Twitter actually drew the world’s, and Ghosh’s, attention to something that I kept to myself all through our meeting – ‘fanqui-town’ sounds very like ‘Funky Town’. Ghosh’s response was three exclamation marks.]
This little book is populated by a handful of painfully shy individuals living on the outskirts of a small Australian town in the 1950s. There’s Betty Fletcher and her two children, Michael and Little Hazel. The children were conceived and born elsewhere, but it’s not the kind of town where people pry into one another’s business. Mues, one of their neighbours, is a retired slaughterer and a pretty unsavoury character – he exposes himself to Little Hazel in the first couple of pages, and it’s a sign of things to come that the little girl, far from being traumatised, is profoundly disappointed that his promise to show her a pony was a trick, that adults can’t be counted on: ‘they hold one thing in their hand and call it another.’ the other neighbour is Harry, a dairy farmer, who has become a virtual member of their family, having dinner with them and being called over to help with masculine tasks like removing a dead possum from their roof. And then there’s Harry’s dairy herd, half a dozen kookaburras and sundry other specimens of animal and bird life.
Not a lot happens: Harry takes notes on the kookaburras’ family life, and his milking of the cows is beautifully described; Betty works in an old men’s home, and her warm-hearted management of their needs is not so very different from Harry’s caring for his cows; Hazel keeps a journal about the bird life at school, and it wins second prize; Harry and Betty have an undeclared mutual attraction that builds convincingly over years; Harry decides to take on young Michael’s sex education, which he does in awkwardly comic conversations and in long letters that are a mix of frank personal reminiscence and weirdly detailed accounts of human female anatomy (possible the book’s central tension hinges on these letters – will he actually give them to Michael, and if so what will happen?); Michael embarks on his own sexual experiences; Mues makes an occasional appearance, each less savoury than the last.
It’s not a book to read for the plot. Tension builds and is resolved without insulting the reader’s intelligence, but the main pleasure is in the way we come to know and care about the characters and understand their place and time. They live in a harsh enough world – not exactly nature red in tooth and claw, but death and an uncompromising physicality are everywhere. If you think of kookaburras as slightly comic, benign creatures, Harry’s observations will put you right. Likewise, big-eyed dairy cattle aren’t all sweetness and light, and looking after old men with dementia isn’t work for those of delicate sensibilities. Yet the depiction of this harsh world is suffused with a warm, compassionate affection the way a Drysdale landscape is with light. That is, things may not be pretty, but they’re closely observed with what, if it’s not love, will do till love comes along.
One small note: I was unsettled when I recognised one of Harry’s personal recollections as an episode from Havelock Ellis’s autobiography, relocated from the London Zoo to an Australian country orchard (if you’re curious you can google “Havelock Ellis” “I did not mean you to see that”). This made me wonder about the sources of the sex education passages. Harry does drop in at the town library and, improbably, read a book by Havelock Ellis (not the autobiography), so perhaps that is an implied acknowledgement. A note up the back acknowledges that the novel’s title is pinched from a 1922 book by Alec Chisolm, perhaps implying that the bird descriptions owe a debt to that book. I guess that’s all fodder for scholars.
This is the eighth book I’ve read as part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013.
When we googled “My Struggle” at the Book Group last month, the top result was Hitler’s Mein Kampf. We were mildly amused by what we took to be a google oddity. But the Norwegian title of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume novel is Min Kamp – a similarity that could hardly be accidental. At the Sydney Writers’ Festival, the man himself told us that the sixth and final volume is a 400 page essay about Adolf Hitler. One has to wonder: if A Death in the Family is point A, how does he get from point A to point Way Off the Chart?
But since only two of the books are available in English so far, that’s a question for later.
Before the meeting: I finished reading A Death in the Family a couple of weeks ago, just after hearing Karl Ove speak at the SWF. I would have moved straight on to the second volume, A Man in Love, if I hadn’t had other more pressing demands on my imaginative faculties. The appeal, for me, is to do with shoe leather.
In the movie business shoe leather is the term for precious screen time wasted on actors walking from place to place. Knausgaard has elevated its written equivalent to a high art. It seems no one ever just gets in a car and drives somewhere: they always turn on the indicator, check the rear-vision mirror and pull out into the traffic, then follow a series of carefully named streets until they arrive at their destination. When a character cleans a book case, it goes like this:
I sprayed the glass door of the bookcase, crumpled up the newspaper and rubbed it over the runny liquid a few times until the glass was dry and shiny. Looked around for more to do while I had the spray in my hand, but saw nothing apart from the windows, which I had determined to save until later. Instead, I went on with the bookcase, tidied everything, starting with its contents.
That man be unremarkable, but so much of the book is taken up with similar attention to detail that how a reader responds to it will have a huge influence on their response to the book as a whole. Early on, there’s a passage about growing up that helps explain what’s happening, as I understand it:
As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to keep a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilise it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years we strive to attain the correct distance from objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty.
I read the narrative’s wealth of undifferentiated detail as an attempt to reverse that process: to give priority to specific observations and experiences over any abstraction, to go for immediately apprehended ‘meaning’ over calm, generalisable ‘knowledge’, to avoid our habitual exclusion of some things from consideration. As well as the tiny acts, the brand names, the hyper-specifics, we are given the narrator’s play of mind, apparently unfiltered – memories and meditations that are jogged by the brand names on cleaning products, say, his adolescent worries about the shape of his penis when erect, or the strange feeling he had as a boy about the gravel on the floor of the family garage. And, because nothing is being left out, he tells us things that are just not talked about: how he shakes his little girl when she irritates him, the extraordinarily squalid circumstances of his father’s death, his grandmother’s incontinence. These last things don’t feel deliberately shocking – more like the inevitable result of a decision made at the beginning to put everything in.
Karl Ove has said that the overwhelming emotion he had while writing the novel was shame. He couldn’t believe anyone would read it, and now he is embarrassed to realise that roughly half a million people know all about his failures as a parent and his sexual inadequacies (those are yet to come, perhaps in the second book).
After the meeting: This book provoked as much sustained conversation as any we’ve discussed in the group. One man who spent his childhood in Britain was most deeply struck by the way the weather was evoked: the grimness of the winter and the way spring came as a great relief. This struck a chord with others who had lived in northern Europe for any length of time. Another man, following his daughter’s lead, had been watching a lot of Simon Amstell‘s recent melancholy stand-up and found a striking resonance with this book. Another man was struck by the book’s failure to make him empathise with the narrator – at one stage he thought it might all be total fiction, that Knausgaard the author might be no more Karl Ove the character than Mark Haddon is Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – and in that case it’s a brilliant creation. I don’t know that anyone liked it as much as I did.
As always, the conversation ranged widely, from the sexist bile being showered on Julia Gillard to details of our lives, all to the tune of excellent pasta, grilled zucchini and fennel and tomato salad.
As Noel Beddoe says in an Author’s Note, this book is fiction, but adheres closely to the history of white settlement near what is now the township of Narrandera, including the Second Wiradjuri War and the massacre on Murdering Island. That’s the same massacre that lies in the background of our short film Ngurrumbang and Andy Kissane’s poem ‘The Station Owner’s Daughter, Narrandera’ that inspired us. It’s my great good fortune that the book wasn’t published until the screenplay was complete and pre-production was well under way – the first I heard of it was a comment from Jim Kable on my blog entry inviting people to donate via pozible. If I’d known of the book any sooner, I would probably have been scared right off.
It’s a formidable achievement. Told from the point of view of Young James Beckett, as a teenager in the 1830s and as an old man in Sydney decades later, it is deeply embedded in its historical moments, and has a powerful sense of place. We care about the characters and come to appreciate their secrets and mysteries, not all of which are revealed, and some not until the last pages. The unfolding narrative gives us neither the ‘dun-dreary naturalism’ that Patrick White hated in Australian fiction, nor the black armband breastbeating that John w Howard claimed to discern and despise among Australian literati, nor again a ripping yarn of the frontier (though unless I’m very confused, Young James mentions reading some James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels must have been hot off the press). The tensions of the colonial society are there – English vs Irish, convicts vs free, authority vs opportunism, women as a tiny, vulnerable minority – but they are embodied in recognisable individuals, facing particular dilemmas. I started this blog entry with the massacre, and most of the publicity for the book has centred around it, but the social, economic and moral world of the settlers is thoroughly fleshed out in its own right well before the prospect of massacre appears on the horizon.
Unlike other fictional treatments of atrocities against Aboriginal people, The Yalda Crossing lays the ground so that we understand how good people can deliberately commit abominable acts, not without reluctance, revulsion and remorse, but with a terrible sense of necessity. The good people who set the tone of the community aren’t drawn into the vortex of violence created by people less grammatically correct than they: when push comes to shove, they are the ones who orchestrate the terrible acts. Launching the book at the Sydney Institute last July, Linda Burney said that as a Wiradjuri woman, descendant of the victims, she had to skip the chapter where the massacre happens and come back to it later. Noel Beddoe, descendant of the perpetrators, doesn’t blink, and invites us, his semblables, to face our heritage with similarly unflinching gaze.
Linda Burney quoted a moment just before the massacre when a white man refuses to take part because he would lose his soul, which is more important to him than gaining the land. (Incidentally, it’s a gauge of the strength of Noel Beddoe’s writing that only when I typed it like that did I recognise the Biblical reference there.) For me, one of the devastatingly true things in the book is how that man, in spite of his genuine refusal to take part, is nonetheless in the end completely implicated.
Every bit as good, I think as Thea Astley’s A Kindness Cup or Kate Grenville’s The Secret River. (Links are to my blog entries, though the one on Kate Grenville’s book is very brief.)
Herta Müller, The Passport (1986, translation by Martin Chalmers 1989, Serpent’s Tail 2009)
I got hold of this book via BookMooch soon after Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. Possibly because the press response wasn’t exactly encouraging (which of course it won’t be until a US writer wins), the book sat on my bedroom bookshelf for four years as a shining testament to pious intentions. I finally picked it up now because I’d read two books in translation, and decided to make it three of a kind.
It’s a very short book, just 92 pages, and it’s made up of short sentences. Here’s a random paragraph:
The skinner had given the stuffed animals to the town museum as a gift. He didn’t receive any money for them. Two men came. Their car stood in front of the skinner’s house for a whole day. It was white and closed like a room.
Sentence after sentence. Page after page. It proceeds in that staccato way. It doesn’t quite say what it’s saying. People do things, and say things, and see things. There are snippets of folklore, a bawdy song, symbolic objects, similes and metaphors as odd as the white room in that quote. You have to fill in the gaps, decode the descriptions. Only a handful of characters have names, the rest being known only by their professions or relationships. It took me until page 42 to realise I was in the middle of a narrative that I hadn’t been following. I started over. I’m glad I did.
It’s a terrible tale of the German-speaking minority in a village in Ceauçescu’s Romania. Uneducated, superstitious, despised by the Romanian majority, they live lives of quiet desperation and degradation. The village miller sets out to secure from the corrupt system a passport that will enable him, his wife and daughter to leave for West Germany.
I hated a lot of this as I was reading it: I just wanted to be told the story, to have a spade called a spade, rather than a headache being called a grain of sand moving around behind the forehead (at least, I assume that was a headache). But there is something mesmeric about it. I’m amazed that now I intend to immerse myself in that world again – not immediately, but when enough time has passed that I will be revisiting it rather than extending the current visit.
A couple of scrappy notes about the translation:
The English title draws attention to the plot, such as it is. The original German, taken from something the miller says at his lowest point, translates as ‘A man is nothing but a pheasant in the world’, and signals the sometimes enigmatic narrative mode.
There is a three-word glossary up the back. I could have done instead with a brief note at the start informing us that the original was written in German, that the action takes place in Romania (something that I’m guessing is obvious in the original but doesn’t become evident in the translation until we’re well under way), that most (all?) of the characters are German-speakers – in other words, filling us in on some things that are almost inevitably lost in translation.
There are one or two places where I completely didn’t know what was being described, and would love to know if it was because of the translation or the original. In particular, there’s a scene in which a woman is pleasuring herself or discovering she has some terrible disease – I’ll refrain from going into detail of the description here, but my confusion is genuine, and her husband’s comment, ‘So that’s how it is with your bladder, my lady,’ doesn’t make any sense either way. Perhaps this is the kind of thing that people mean when they say Herta Müller writes surrealism.
I suspect that this book is another that was a nightmare to translate, and it’s wonderful what a distinctive voice comes through in the telling.
PS: When I had uploaded all that I went to LibraryThing to post a version of it as a review there. And behold there was a very interesting post by Meisterpfriem, who had loved the book in German and been surprised at its lukewarm reception in Engish translation. I recommend it.
Mercè Rodoreda, In Diamond Square (1962, Translation by Peter Bush, Virago 2013)
Before the meeting: I came to this book with inaccurate expectations. Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes it on the cover as ‘the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War’, which I misread, lazily, as ‘about the Spanish Civil War’. True, the action of the novel spans the years of the Civil War, which is a major element in the story, but it would be quite a stretch to say the novel is about the war. The novel tells the story of Natalia, a naive, uneducated young woman from Gracia, then a poor area of Barcelona rather than what the internet now calls ‘one of the city’s hippest areas’. She marries a volatile young man whose entrepreneurial ambition fills their apartment, bizarrely and malodorously, with pigeons. The Civil War disrupts their family life when her husband and their male friends joins the militia – we see none of the combat, and none of the reasons for the war are discussed or explained, but we stay within Natalia’s narrow horizons, following her through wretchedness, deprivation, despair and unexpected happiness (though, to save spoilers, not necessarily in that order).
It’s a gripping story, with some brilliant images, but the thing that struck me most strongly was the language. Natalia is the narrator, and her voice is what makes the novel what it is. She begins:
Julie came to the cake-shop just to tell me they would be raffling coffee pots before they got to the lucky posy; she’d seen them and they were lovely, an orange split in two, showing its pips, painted on a white background. I didn’t feel like going to the dance or even going out, after I’d spent the whole day selling cakes and my fingertips ached from tying all those gilded raffia knots and handles. And because I knew Julie could manage on as little as three hours’ sleep and didn’t mind whether she slept or not.
She begins as she plans to go on, with leaps in logic (from the coffee-pot design to the question of whether she will go out or not, omitting to mention that Julie had come to take her there), syntax that doesn’t quite cohere (‘And because’ – huh?), attention to details that lead nowhere (‘an orange split in two’ etc), lack of orientation (who is Julie?), unexplained cultural references (are we supposed to know what ‘the posy’ is?), and so on. Then it took me a moment to figure out that the third they was a different they from the first two, that Julie is talking about the coffee pots, not the people who were raffling them, and because that tiny awkwardness feels like the kind of thing that happens in translation, I lost confidence as a reader , and as I read on I couldn’t tell how much of the narrative voice was Natalia’s and how much was the sound of Peter Bush wrangling the transition from Catalan into English. I wasn’t necessarily critical of the translation: perhaps this is one of those books that defies translation – as I imagine Malcolm Knox’s The Life to be. (A literal translation of DK’s ‘Well yeah … but no’ would probably leave Catalan readers floundering, but how else do you translate it?)
I read on, enjoying the book, but my unease about the translation persisted, and about a hundred pages from the end I turned to the Internet for help. I don’t know what I expected, but I found an excellent article from the British journal The Translator, ‘Language and Characterization in Mercè Rodoreda’s La Plaça del Diamant‘ by Helena Miguélez Carballeira, which discusses the language of the book in the context of two previous translations. According to Ms Carballeira, Natalia’s discourse is what the boffins call escriptura parlada – spoken writing. Mercè Rodoreda sets out to ‘trace the discursive peculiarities’ of the uneducated Catalan working-class. Her speech is also full of features that mark it as peculiar to Barcelona, and is full of the euphemism, attention to detail and diminutives that mark stereotypically feminine speech. More than that, Carballeira argues (and I’m persuaded) that
Natàlia is a woman who feels uneasy with the very act of speaking. … The characteristics of [her] conversational, unmediated speech as a discursive device in the novel are rather predictable: there is an extensive use of idioms and colloquialisms, interjections and onomatopoeias. This yields a constant, highly idiomatic, non-straightforward use of language.
That is to say, Natalia is at least as big a headache for a translator as Knox’s DK.
A gauge of the difficulty of the task is the differences between translations. Carballeira discusses a number of fascinating examples. Here’s just one, quoted in a discussion of Natalia’s use of euphemism:
The original Catalan (1962):
I mentre em dedicava a la gran revolució amb els coloms va venir el que va venir, com una cosa que havia de ser molt curta.
From Eda O’Shiel’s The Pigeon Girl (1967):
And while I devoted my energies to the grand revolt against the pigeons, there took place what had to take place, and it seemed as if it would be over quickly.
From David H Rosenthal’s The Time of the Doves (1986):
And while I was working on the great revolution with the doves the war started and everyone thought it was going to be over quickly.
From Peter Bush’s In Diamond Square (2013):
And while I was waging my big revolution against the pigeons, what was brewing came, that they said would be a two-day wonder.
Having read this article when I was struggling, part way through the book, I had a much better time with the rest. Some of Peter Bush’s decisions had confused me. For example, he names Natalia’s husband Joe, possibly as what Carballeira calls a domesticating strategy, but when I read that his name is Quimet in the original I realised that the discord between his English name and his Catalan context had niggled away at the edge of my mind, creating a sense of unreality like the one in some CGI movies, where figures don’t quite seem to touch the ground. And another example: Joe/Quimet refuses to call Natalia by her name but calls her Pidgie, without explanation of where the name comes from – to my ear that sounded a bit like Piggsy, and so vaguely insulting, and it was a long way into the story that I realised it was short for Pigeon, and that Joe/Quimet was obsessed with those birds; in the original he calls her Columeta, which my computer translates from the Catalan as, you guessed it, Pigeon. Maybe to a British ear ‘Pidgie’ sounds more affectionate than ‘Pigeon’, but ‘Pigeon’ would have worked fine for me.
This experience makes me suspect that if I’m going to read books in translation a little bit of research will make the whole experience go better. As it happens I’ve been to Barcelona, so quite a few of the local references – Tibidabo, Parc Güell, etc – made immediate sense to me. If I hadn’t been there, I doubt if I would have bothered to get out a map, but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea. (I do think I was right, though, not to read the author’s spoilerish 1982 ‘Prologue’ until after I’d read the book.)
The meeting: We were astonishingly unanimous in our responses to the book. We’d all enjoyed it; we’d all been at least mildly disconcerted by the language, though when someone read a short passage aloud, its ‘written speech’ qualities were obvious; we’d all engaged with Natalia and formed strong opinions about Joe/Quimet; and I think we’d all had our heartstrings / tear ducts activated. There was an attempt to get someone to read the last couple of pages, which are full of sweet, kind-of-sexual tenderness, but no one was up for the challenge. We enjoyed the book so much we contemplated staying with Catalonia for our next meeting, and reading The Sun Also Rises, Homage to Catalonia and perhaps something by Colm Toibín. (We decided against it, and will be heading off to Norway instead with Karl Ove Knausgaard.)
Julius, the narrator–protagonist of this novel, is a psychiatrist by trade, but as far as we’re concerned he is a flâneur: we don’t quite have a word in English for such a person, one who strolls (flâne) around a city, observing people and things with a detached, intelligent curiosity, and no other agenda. Julius strolls from street to street, from church to bar, gallery to movie theatre to concert hall. He visits an old friend who is dying, phones a former girlfriend, has a casual sexual encounter, chats with the man who checks the air-conditioning vents on the subway, is mugged, runs into the sister of a friend from his teenage years. Almost always, he is moved by whim rather than intention, and when he does set out on a quest at one point, the quest comes to absolutely nothing.
The city is New York, though Julius visits Brussels for a spell and continues his flâning ways there. I didn’t read the book with a street map open beside it, but I expect that if I had I’d have known to within a block or two where I was on almost every page. The same goes for time: he visits and responds to particular films, concerts and exhibitions, and I’m reasonably sure that the date he saw them on could be approximated by a quick check of past issues of New York newspapers.
In a way, just as Julius’ wanderings trace the shape of the city, his encounters (not all of them are conversations) build a picture of the less tangible social and political world, mostly from perspectives other than the dominant one, as most of the people he talks to are not white – he himself is the Nigerian-born son of a German mother and a Nigerian father.
But the book is not the meandering bore or disguised tract that description may conjure up. True, it doesn’t have a central quest or conflict needing resolution. Also true, there are reflections on the state of racism and internalised racism in the US, on ‘political correctness’, on Middle Eastern politics. But none of the reflections amounts to a didactic ‘line’, and there is a quiet and unobtrusive overall arc. We get to know Julius, and start to wonder about him. He has an ambivalent attitude to African-Americans in general – welcoming the sense of connection but shying away from the enforcement of identity. He loves his old English professor and knows he is dying, yet visits him only twice over many weeks, and when he discovers on his third visit that his old friend has died, he resumes his peripatetic ways without missing more than a beat. There is a striking lack of affect in his account of a sexual encounter with a Czech woman in Brussels. His quest to find his German grandmother is oddly half-hearted. His music references are incredibly erudite, and you might start to wonder if ‘incredible’ might be more precise than it at first seems – that he might be straining to project an image of himself as a man of high culture. It’s not that we’re being given a coded alternative version, but we realise that, perhaps inadvertently, he is telling us a lot about what it means to be a mixed-heritage, middle-class African immigrant to the US. Perhaps it’s a sop to the conventional reader that there is a surprise revelation towards the end, but I found it both disturbing and deeply satisfying that Julius lets the revelation sit on the page with only a broad introductory comment, as if he is as stunned by it as we are.
I’m not sure what the title means. An open city, in the usual wartime context of the term, has declared that it will not defend itself in case of attack. Perhaps Manhattan is wide open, ready to yield its secrets to anyone who wants to walk its streets and buildings with eyes and mind on the alert. Or perhaps Julius is the open city of the title – laying himself out there without defensiveness.
Open City was one of the books I took home from our last Book[-swapping] Club. It took me months to actually pick it up because I’m generally suspicious of books and movies that treat New York as a cosmos. This isn’t one of those.
Sunil Gangopadhyay, The Lonely Monarch (2005, translated from Bengali by Swapna Dutta, Hachette India 2013)
My high school French and Latin teacher, Brother Gerard, taught us a healthy respect for the art of translation. When he wrote ‘Excellent attempt’ in the margin of one of my exercises, he explained that it was high praise, that all anyone could aspire to was an attempt at translation – the thing itself must remain forever elusive: if you stay too close to the original, your translation won’t sound like natural English, and if you produce something that feels natural in English you will have lost the feel of the original. Kumārajīva (343–430 CE), one of the sub-continent’s great translators of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit to Chinese, said that translation was like ‘chewing rice for others, which would not only lose its original taste, but also make people feel like vomiting’. (Translations of his statement differ.) So translators are heroic people who serve the common good, building bridges between cultures that might otherwise remain dangerously ignorant of each other, but they do so knowing that page after page, book after book, they must fail.
I don’t know any Bengali at all, so I can’t comment on the accuracy of Swapna Dutta’s translation of Sunil Gangopadhyay‘s Nihsanga Samrat. But it gave me that delicious sense of access to a place that would have remained closed to me without her labours. The eponymous lonely monarch is Sisirkumar Bhaduri (1889–1959), a pioneer of Bengali theatre, or at least a fictional stand-in for him, as this is a fictional rendition of the real Sisirkumar’s life. His theatrical project was to Bengal roughly what Louis Esson’s Pioneer Players were to Australia, not quite a national theatre but a profound influence on audiences’ tastes, though the comparison underplays the significance of Sisirkumar. The theatre as he found it was ruled by Western conventions, women actors were generally prostitutes, the emphasis was on spectacle. He and his colleagues reached for a theatre that incorporated traditional jatra forms; his partner Kankabati was an educated woman who became even more acclaimed as an actor than he was; his plays were often adaptations from serious novels.
Calcutta (as it is called here) had a thriving theatre scene in the 1920s and 30s, rich with artistic ambition, greed, brilliant collaboration, vicious competition, surprising acts of generosity, sweet loyalty, despair, alcoholism, romance … Sisir, as he was known to his friends, was at the heart of it as an actor–producer. In a postscript to her translator’s note, Swapna Dutta gives brief introductions to twenty characters who were important personalities of the time ‘whom people outside Bengal might not know’: poets, artists, playwrights, scholars, political figures. Without this help, the sense of a flourishing cultural scene would still have been vividly realised, but for foreign readers like me the names would have passed in a blur (actually, they still mostly did, but now I knew the nature of the blur!). Some names didn’t need a note: the great Rabindranath Tagore is partly a kind of tutelary deity whose approval is beyond price for the younger generation, and partly the esteemed elder whose mould they need to break; Sunil Gangopadhyay himself makes a brief appearance as a young man among Sisir’s admirers; and Satyajit Ray, Bengali director of many great films including Pather Panchali, has a moment towards the end of the book.
Sisirkumar takes a troupe of actors to New York in 1930. The trip has its disastrous moments, but it starts with a rapturous welcome. A young Indian man living in New York explains:
Ordinary Americans hardly ever come across Indians. Most of them are under the impression that Indian women are either kept under lock and key or burnt as a sati; that young children who enter the river are devoured by crocodiles; that the roads in India are packed with sadhus and yogis, tigers and snakes. They are clueless about our art, culture, literature or music.
Although there’s no whiff of an instructional intention in this book, I’m at least a little less clueless for having read and enjoyed it.
(Sisirkumar Bhaduri does have a Wikipedia entry, but it doesn’t say very much, and IMDb lists the eight films that he directed and acted in, which were very much a sideshow to his career in the live theatre.)
Full disclosure: Swapna Dutta is a friend of mine, though we’ve never met in person. She contributed a number of elegant stories to The School Magazine when I was editor, including retellings from Hindu and Buddhist classics as well as original stories, and we have stayed in touch by email since. Hachette India sent me a complimentary copy of this book.
I read the first of this book’s three sections to the Art Student on the car trip from Airey’s Inlet in Victoria to Sydney. Given my proofreader past, this can be a punishing way to encounter a book – few things disrupt a book’s spell more than a reader-aloud complaining about misspellings, malapropisms, mixed metaphors, misquotes, or awkward turns of phrase. Embarrassing sex scenes will do it too (we may never get over The Slap). All That I Am stood up to the ordeal well, and we both enjoyed the trip. Mind you, the reading wasn’t disrupted by tears or cries of joy either. And I couldn’t tell at that stage whether hearing myself reading it all aloud made the different narrators’ voices sound much the same.
As everyone probably knows by now, the novel’s main characters were part of the left opposition to Hitler. Alternate chapters are told by Ernst Toller, a playwright and activist, dictating additions to his memoir in a New York hotel room in 1939, and Ruth Becker, a retired school teacher experiencing vivid memories in Bondi Junction in 2001. As both of them think back over their lives and their relationships, their shared story unfolds. Ruth, we are told in a note at the back, is based on a friend of the author. Ernst Toller was a real person, and so are the other main characters: Hans Wesemann, Berthold Jacob and the woman at the heart of the story, Dora Fabian.
Dora is a brilliant, charismatic, passionate revolutionary. She is Ruth’s adored cousin and intimate friend, and she is Toller’s assistant and the love of his life. Our narrators don’t have much to do with each other, but Dora has been central to both their lives. Through Ruth we see snatches of her childhood and later those parts of her activism that don’t revolve around Toller. Toller is very much the centre of his own world, both as the public figure Dora calls the Great Toller and as the private ma prone to depression and self doubt, but in 1939 he is acknowledging how important Dora has been to him in both spheres.
It’s a gripping yarn that takes us from the immediate aftermath of World War One to the brink of World War Two, with Ruth’s old age as a kind of integrated coda. I learned a lot about the resistance to Hitler in Germany and elsewhere, particularly England. I can’t say that I was swept away by the story itself, but a slow burning emotional truth comes through about the importance of resistance, even in the face of apparently sure defeat: one of the characters says that they will all be forgotten by history, and it’s true that the Germans who opposed the rise of Hitler at huge cost to themselves tend to be ignored in popular versions of that history. The book captures brilliantly the gradual transformation of a group of revolutionaries who see their conflict with the Nazis, not necessarily as evenly matched, but at least on a scale that allows for cheerful derision, to their final condition as a dispossessed, demoralised group crying out from the margins and betrayed by those they held dearest. (I’m not giving you any spoilers there: most people know how that panned out.)
So that’s my second book in the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge. So far, so very good.
Kevin Powers served in the US Army in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, and this novel draws on that experience. It’s a story about combat told by someone who was there. It needs to be approached with respect. And I did. I was repelled by some callous and/or confused anti-Islamic imagery in the first paragraph (‘The war tried to kill us in the spring … While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.’). But I read on.
Me fail? I fly! 