This book is part of the Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia project, based at the University of Sydney. According to the project’s website:
Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia brings together historical materials from national and international collections in languages other than English. We seek to rethink and enlarge narratives about Australia that come solely from English-language sources, by showing modern Australia to be a complex multilingual creation.
According to its introduction, the book offers a small selection from the substantial body of verse in Chinese produced in Australia in the first third of the 20th century. There are 41 poems and a prose record of an excursion to Taronga zoo, all given in the original Chinese with an English translation and brief notes on the poems and, where possible, on the authors.
Mostly they are occasional poems – written to mark the arrival or departure of a friend or colleague, or to record an event of some sort. They also reflect on the political situation in China, and the experience of being Chinese in Australia. They come from sources such as Sydney’s Chinese Republic News and Tung Wah Times. Collectively, they give a sense of an active transient community of literate Chinese in this country.
An editorial decision was made by the translators not to attempt to reproduce the poetic forms of the poems. For a reader who can’t read Chinese then, the book bears witness to the existence of these poems while offering only shadow of the actual poetry. Here’s a taste:
There is nothing in the poem to indicate that it was written in Australia, but an endnote informs us that it was published in the Chinese Republic News on 9 August 1919. Unlike most of the poems in the book, it was anonymous, and there is no note from the author. The editors’ note, which refers to it and the poem on the next spread, gives us a glimpse of a community living in Australia but alive to a Chinese national point of view.
The Chinese, on the right, clearly conforms to a strict poetic form. There are four lines, each consisting of two parts made up of eight characters. With that in mind, I go back to what at first seems to be straightforward English prose on the left, and see that it actually consists of four couplets.
This makes me itch to do a version that reads more like poetry. Here’s a go:
We dreamed of peace and wake to sorrow. Talks have failed, packed up and gone. POTUS sang a sweet love song. Disaster from the east tomorrow.
Bridge builder, Robin Hood, pocket-liner, power-grabber, split our melon, feed the robber. Our plains blaze. We must gather wood.
I’m not saying that the editors / translators should have done anything differently, let alone anything as rinky-dink as that. It’s just that while I appreciated the historical, sociological interest of the book, I wished I could have a greater sense of the poetry.
I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I live and blog on Gadigal and Wangal land, and gratefully acknowledge their Elders past and present, I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.
Before the meeting: This novel invites readers into the world of leftist Iranians who allied with Islamists against the Shah in the 1970s, only to face exile or worse under the rule of the Ayatollahs. Though it was written before Trump’s first presidential term, and Ruth Martin’s wonderfully readable translation was published before his current war on Iran, it takes on extra power when read in the context of those events.
It is the story of one Iranian family told in four slices of time: 1979, the year the Shah was deposed and the Islamic Republic was established; 1989, when the family is living in exile in Germany; 1999, when the regime relaxes a little and some family members visit Tehran; 2009, when once again the streets of Tehran are full of protests in the Green Movement, and the exiles watch the brutal repression unfold on social media. An undated epilogue tentatively suggests a brighter future.
Each section has a different narrator. In the first, youthful Behraz tells how he and his two close male friends see their hopes for a socialist revolution dashed, and though in his political fervour he believes there is no time for romance, he is drawn to the beautiful Nahid. In the second, ten years later, Nahid is married to Behraz. She describes their life in Germany and remembers the events that led to their flight from Iran. In the third, their eldest daughter, Laleh, takes up the story, describing a visit to Tehran, her first experience of noisy, exuberant family life, and the quiet revelation of the fates of Behraz’s friends. In the fourth, Mohad/Mo, who was a rowdy little boy in the previous section, now deals with the dual identity of dissipated German university student and Iranian exile.
Shida Bazyar is a German writer whose parents, like Behzad and Nahid, were communist activists in Iran in the lead-up to the 1979 revolution. They left the country in 1988 and – unlike Laleh and Mo – Shida was born in Germany. The book clearly draws on the author’s family’s experience, both in the youthful activism against the Shah and then against the Ayatollah, and in the experience of exile. Especially in the third section, when teenage Laleh returns to Tehran, the writing feels so alive it must be drawing on actual experience. (I’ll stand by that statement even though Shida Bazyar was born in 1988, so was one year old at the time of the fictional visit.)
A look at page 79* gies you an idea of the quality of the writing – including the fluency of the translation.
It’s part of Nahid’s narrative. She is remembering the moment when they decided to leave Iran, early in the 1980s. Behraz’s friend Peyman is visiting their safe house to tell them he has received a letter requiring him to turn himself in to the Islamic regime, which they all know means he is to be arrested for his communist activism. It’s a quiet, decisive moment in their lives:
Look after yourself, Behzad told Peyman – it sounded like a throwaway remark – and then Peyman said, Look after yourself. At least I know I have three whole days of freedom left, and you have no such security, comrade. His expression remained serious as Behzad laughed. We shook hands for a long time, Peyman and I, then Peyman gave me back the tea glass before putting on his shoes, his small, clean leather shoes, and once more he smiled before hurrying away into the darkness, as we closed the door quietly behind him.
The emotional intensity of the moment is conveyed entirely through gesture: Peyman has accepted the oblgatory glass of tea, but he has not sat down, and at parting he shakes Nahid’s hand ‘for a long time’. The door closes quietly behind him as he disappears into the darkness, and we know it’s the last time Nahid and Behzad will see him. (It’s not a spoiler to say that in Laleh’s narrative, when they meet up with Peyman’s widow ten years later, the emotion is much more on the surface.) The paragraph is also a beautiful example of how the novel portrays character. Nahid wants us to know that Peyman is anything but a performative martyr. He plays with children, and takes their words seriously, and when he is about to surrender himself to the regime, he manages a deadpan joke about the danger hanging over his friend.
Once Peyman has gone, the composure breaks:
Behzad and I were like abandoned children in our living room, which, although it was a hiding place arranged by the movement, was slowly becoming homely, with framed poems by Hafez and Rumi on the walls, and Laleh’s paintings in among them. I clutched Peyman’s tea glass, and as we sat down mechanically and the tears began to well up in my eyes, Behzad said, Nahid, this time we’re going to do it right, this time we need to leave. Then finally we looked at one another, and in my mind’s eye I could see all the situations in which Behzad and Peyman had sat in the midst of our friends, discussing things with serious faces. Peyman, the clever, quiet one, and Behzad, the one who called the shots, and the state probably didn’t care which of them it threw into its dungeons first, but it would only be a matter of time before Behzad got a letter, too.
That paragraph is mostly important in the flow of the novel as giving a flashback to the moment Behzad and Nahid decide to leave Iran and come to Germany. On paying closer attention to it for this blog post, I noticed something that slipped by me on first reding.
Nahid mentions Hafez and Rumi, two towering figures in Persian/Iranian culture. Her attachment to them was something that drew Behzad to her in the first place, and here they have an honoured place on the wall with little Laleh’s paintings – emblematic reminders that there is more to the life of these characters and this nation than endless struggle. Yet nowhere in the novel is either of them quoted.
A few pages later, the couple discuss a poem by Bertolt Brecht. The poem is ‘Thoughts on the Duration of Exile‘, but even though it is eminently relevant to their situation, it is only indirectly named and quoted. It’s clear from this and other moments that poetry is important to Nahid, and probably to Behzad as well. Readers aren’t given a direct look at any of it.
Then I realised that something similar happens in earlier parts of the novel. The main action, from one point of view, is the characters’ activism. Yet there are very few specifics about that activism: Behraz drives a car full of leaflets, but we don’t know what is in them or what is to be done with them. He spends time with other revolutionaries in a captured barracks, but what they do there is passed over in silence. We know that he is risking his freedom, even his life, but we don’t know what he is doing.
Some readers may find this effect frustrating or evasive. I didn’t. This isn’t an educational documentary about Iranian culture and history, it’s a story of how that history affects the lives of one small family – and by implication, many more.
The book was written before the Women, Life Freedom demonstrations of 2022 (link here) and its brutal repression. Things were so bad that in mid 2026 members of the Iranian diaspora in Sydney were demonstrating in favour of Trump’s invasion. As I was reading the last pages of the book, Donald Trump was reported as saying he would ‘beat the f***ing s**t out of Iran. The grief that permeates the book’s last pages seems more insistent and the hopeful epilogue more unrealistic with every passing news flash.
At the meeting:
It turned out that for a couple of us the stories in this book gave them insights into things they had been told or noticed about Iranians in their lives. And conversely, stories they had heard from those friends helped in their appreciation of the book. A small example: in Laleh’s section, Iranians presen their visiting family members with gifts in plastic bags – when this happened our group member’s acquaintance she had though it was just her Iranian family being offhand, but the book makes it seem a matter of cultural difference.
We were all engaged by the book. A couple of people – maybe everyone except me – found the first section, Behraz’s narrative, hard to follow and a bit boring. Weirdly, I liked his narrative because of its clarity. I think I read it with the utterly confusing opening of Sofi Oksanen,’s When the Doves Disappeared (link is to my blog post) fresh in my mind: I knew where the characters’ allegiances lay and wasn’t bothered by the lack of specifics about their activities.
We generally agreed that the two women’s narratives – that is, Nahid’s and Laleh’s – were the most engrossing. Nahid’s account of the experience of exile and Laleh’s wrestle with dual identity were especially strong. No one was particularly convinced by young Mo’s activism – he goes to demos about student fees and watches videos about Iran only because his German girlfriend wants him to. At least that’s how one person read him. My sense of him is kinder than that, and I found his section very moving as a picture of a young man more or less adrift from his cultural moorings, along with the horror of the repression of the Green Revolution.
We read the book along with Ann Patchett’s Whistler. When I blogged about Whistler, I mentioned that we did a little karaoke at the end of the evening. It says something about the difference between the books if I mention here that we also heard about the youthful political struggles on one member and current tribulations of a family member of another.
I read The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran and wrote the first part of this blog post on Wulgurukaba country, on the beautiful island of Yunbenun. The Book Club’s five members, all of settler heritage, met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the rest of the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present of all those Nations and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.
Before the meeting: The action of this book takes place in in two time frames: under German occupation 1941–1943, and as part of the USSR 1963–1966. In the first chapters, the Germans are seen as liberators from the yoke of Communism, but as the nature of the Nazi regime becomes evident, Estonian freedom fighters who have resisted the Soviets now take up arms against the Germans. And there are pragmatists who make themselves useful to the Germans and later, perhaps after a time in Siberian exile, manage to rise in the ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy. The book follows the careers of three Estonians: Roland, who remains a principled freedom fighter (though he tends to fade from the narrative until he makes a surprise reappearance late in the book); Edgar, who disowns his early Soviet identity to work for the Germans and twenty years later is manufacturing propaganda for the Soviets, with many betrayals in his wake; and Juudit, Edgar’s unhappy wife who becomes the mistress of a German officer, works for the resistance and in the 1960s is once again living a wretched, alcohol-soaked life with Edgar.
It’s a hard book to get into. The ground is always shifting under the characters’ feet, and the reader is often left partly in the dark. Here’s the opening:
We went to Rosalie’s grave one last time and placed some wild flowers on the grassy moonlit mound. We were silent for a moment with the blooms between us. I didn’t want to let Juudit go, which is why I said out loud what a person shouldn’t say in that situation: ‘We’ll never see each other again.’ I could hear the gravel in my voice, and it brought a gleam of water to her eyes.
There’s an awkwardness about the language that at first I thought might be a problem with the translation, as if award-winning Lola M. Rogers didn’t have a feel for natural English: ‘a gleam of water’ is an odd way to speak of tears, for instance, and there’s a weird, tight-lipped disjointedness. But the awkwardness is at one with other unsettling elements. We don’t know who the speaker is, or why he and Juudit are visiting the grave at night, and for me at least these questions aren’t definitively answered until very late in the book. This opening scene is the only one set in 1948, and only when I went back to it after reading the whole book did I understand that in characteristically elliptical way it fills in a lot of the blanks about what happened between 1943 and 1963.
The elusive quality is a feature not a bug. It reflects the reality of the characters’ lives under both Nazi and Soviet regimes: you never know who you can trust, or when you might inadvertently let slip some detail from your past that will incriminate you. The narrative is infected by this secretiveness. It doesn’t make for pleasant reading, but I came away from the book with a deeper understanding of the human cost of living under totalitarianism, and a slightly better informed picture of the history of Estonia in the middle of last century.
Two pernickety whinges. My copy of the book comes with paraphernalia designed for book groups – a glossary, a list of questions for discussion, suggested further treading, and an interview with the author. I found this vaguely insulting, like the time I went on a school excursion to see a performance of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, only to have my post-theatre rumination on the bus home rudely interrupted by the school principal quizzing me with comprehension questions. Please, let me just read it! (Less irritating but more pervasive is the use of US spelling – why, in a British edition?)
The Book Club meeting: As you can tell from the above, I wasn’t wild about the book, but I liked it a lot more than anyone else in the group. We discussed it along with Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing. This book got pretty short shrift. If you love it, the comments are wide open for your input.
The three books taken together might have amounted to travel-deterrant propaganda for four countries, featuring terrible, ingrained violence in Northern Ireland, endemic mutual distrust in Estonia, wild unpredictability in India. and overconfident promises made and disastrously not kept in the USA. Our next meeting we’re going to Iran (The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran) and the USA (Ann Patchett’s Whistler). What could possibly go wrong?
The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on the beautiful, unceded land of Gadigal of the Darug Nation, and I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal country. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.
Huang Fan, Flower Ash (translated by Josh Stenberg, Flying Island Books 2024)
Huang Fan is a Nanjing-based poet and novelist who has received many awards and prizes in his homeland, and has been described as the Chinese mainland poet of most interest to Taiwanese readers. His work has been widely translated, including into English. Flower Ash is a wonderfully accessible introduction to his work.
The Flying Islands website (at this link) quotes US novelist Phillip Lopate::
In these powerful, exquisite poems, Huang Fan, a major Chinese poet, takes stock of his life from the vantage point of middle age, finding deep connections with nature, but also rueful solitude, memories of lostness, and a lingering sense of missed opportunities. These translations beautifully capture a threnody of wonder and sadness which is the poet’s singular achievement.
It’s a bilingual book. On each spread, Josh Stenberg’s English version is on the left and Huang Fan’s original Chinese on the right. Perhaps partly because of this, I was always aware, as I read, that the real poem, over there on the right, was inaccessible to me. (A bilingual reader would of course have a very different experience.)
The poem ‘Mayfly’ on pages 78* and 79 is a good example:
Don’t you just wish you could read those beautiful lines of characters on the right-hand page?
The English, by contrast, feels unadorned. The first two lines lay out the poem’s central idea:
we too are mayflies, knowing the four seasons but living only in one season of a single day
Mayflies live for a single day. From some perspectives, our lives are similarly short.
The following lines present different images to represent the same idea: a lifetime is ‘a moment of the milky way’, the High Tang period (the eighth century CE, a golden age of Chinese poetry) is just a day, what we see as an ocean is just a stagnant puddle. And so on. It’s hard to see that anything much is happening that isn’t already there in the first lines.
I think the problem is translation. Not that Josh Stenberg’s translation is inadequate, on the contrary. But translation itself is problematic. I suspect the music of the original, and the visual play that’s happening in the ideograms, are simply untranslatable, and what we get is like a musical score, or a choreographer’s notes.
But even given all that, the poem takes an interesting turn:
with no chance to see the recesses of the mind we treat a dewdrop like a shatterproof heart
The imagery is no longer straightforward illustration of a straightforward idea. These lines open out to something deeper, less easily paraphrased. It’s no longer the perspective of deep time or deep space that is being evoked but the depths of the mind and the complexities of human emotion. If it mistaken to think of the dewdrop as a shatterproof heart, is there an implied heartbreak, an unfathomable sorrow – even ‘a threnody of wonder and sadness’?
After briefly returning to a catalogue of oppositions – breeze/gale, lily pads/islands – the poem lands on this:
it seems that only the trees shade, the haze in our eyes is praying: the leaves willing to fall from the branch have souls the same as us seizing transience fast with all their life, safeguarding ------- the fleeting vanities
This doesn’t yield coherence easily. I confess I got some help – I went to Google translate, and found this:
It seems that there is only the shadow of the tree - the haze in our eyes is praying: may the leaves falling from the trees have the same heart as us Use your life to hold on to the short-lived and keep ------- the delusion of flying
Again, the Chinese text is a closed book to me, but to my ignorant eye, and to my astonishment, the robot makes better sense than the award-winning human translator. Instead of ‘only the trees shade’, which makes no easy sense, the mechanical translation has ‘there is only the shadow of the tree’ – that is, we don’t see the real world, but something like the shadows in Plato’s cave. Instead of the leaves ‘willing to fall’, it is the speaker who wills –’may the leaves falling’: it’s not a description but a prayer (which follows on from ‘praying’ at the start of the line). And in the last line it’s no longer the leaves ‘seizing transience’, but the reader being urged to do so. What we experience may be ‘fleeting vanities’ (much more resonant than ‘delusions of flying’, even though the latter fits the idea of falling leaves better), but it’s what we have, and we (‘you’ in the robot’s translation, ‘the leaves’ in the human’s) need to seize it fast / hold onto it.
I didn’t set out to do this, but I seem to have taken a single poem and demonstrated that reading poems in translation is fraught.
I did enjoy the book, and am glad that Flying Islands regularly include Chinese–English bilingual books.
I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Jørn Lier Horst, The Traitor (translated by Anne Bruce, narrated by Steve John Shepherd, Penguin Audio 2024) Dervla McTiernan, The Unquiet Grave (narrated by Aoife McMahon, HarperAudio 2025)
In the last couple of weeks the Emerging Artist and I have driven from Sydney to the Great Ocean Road and back. Part of the way back our rear vision mirror was filled with great clouds of smoke that made the sun look like a little pink button, and on just one night we arrived in a motel that was without power for a couple of hours because of the extreme heat. But in our journeying we managed to listen to two audiobooks.
The Traitor is part of the Wisting series – the thirteenth instalment or so. Wisting is a scandi detective whom I’ve seen a bit of on television. It’s not one of my favourite shows, but a novel promised a story to keep us alert when driving and awake when passengering. Sadly, in the event I found my thoughts wandering when I was driving and i fell asleep when I was passenger. It may have been Steve John Shepherd’s matter-of-fact narration or Anne Bruce’s translation, but the relentless attention to detail made it almost impossible for me with my clearly feeble power to concentrate to keep track. If anything, listening to this audiobook confirmed me in my long-ago decision not to read any more crime novels.
But then on the way home we listened to The Unquiet Grave, and my resolve weakened. It’s the fourth in Dervla McTiernan’s Cormac Reilly series, wonderfully complex with at least four cases on the go at once, plus complex relationships among the detectives.
The main murder plot runs through a series of suspects, and I’m not complaining that the final revelation is a bit of a frost. There are a number of subplots – in particular one that involves major cybercrime in which the main criminal gets his come-uppance in a most satisfactory manner
Aoife McMahon’s narration wonderful. She really does do the police in different voices.
[Full disclosure: I am one of two proofreaders acknowledged at the end of the The Unquiet Grave for ‘going the extra mile’. I wouldn’t have mentioned it as we proofreaders usually go unnamed and it feels like bad form to claim an involvement. It’s nice to be acknowledged!]
I listened to these stories as I travelled through a number of lands, including Wiradjuri, Wadawurrung and Yuim. I wrote the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those peoples, and welcome any First Nations readers.
László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance (1989, translated by George Szirtes, published by Tuskar Rocks Press 2000)
Before the meeting: László Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Melancholy of Resistance (Hungarian title Az ellenállás melankóliája) was his second novel. Written as the Communist regime was collapsing in Hungary in 1989, it centres around an outbreak of senseless mass violence in a small Hungarian town. In real life, happily, the transition from Communism to a version of democracy was peaceful, but the book’s nightmarish vision and weird allegorical tale resonate far beyond its immediate political context.
One thing was clear to me as I read: this book, with its absence of paragraph breaks, long internal monologues about, for example, esoteric musicology, a key character who remains unseen and unheard except for weird chirping sounds, and many story lines that peter out or are resolved with a throwaway comment in the middle of something else, could never be made into a film. I was wrong. In 2000 (the year this translation was published), Béla Tarr adapted it in Werckmeister Harmonies, which has been called ‘one of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema’ (an impressive accolade, even if it was written in the YouTube comments section).
I haven’t seen the film, but I can’t think of a better way to convey the feel of the book than to show you its trailer:
There you have it: the young, naive idealist who may well be the idiot people think he is; the old, disillusioned musicologist; the corpse of a huge whale wheeled into town; the ominously silent crowds of men; the awful mob violence; the invading military (though I don’t remember a helicopter in the book). Some elements are missing, though I expect they’re in the movie itself: a mysterious character known as the Prince, two children caught in the crossfire, and the key roles of two women. Nor do the streets of the movie seem quite as covered in frozen garbage as those of the novel.
The book’s most striking feature is absence of paragraph breaks and the predominance of long sentences. The sight of page after page of uninterrupted text is intimidating at first, and it’s annoying having to hunt around if you lose your place, but the effect on the page, as I imagine it is on the screen, is a dreamlike flow. And George Szirtes’ has translated the Hungarian into extraordinarily smooth English that enhances that effect. This isn’t Proust, where the sentences turn in on themselves, clauses nesting within clauses, with a hypnotic, introspective effect. Here the effect is more propulsive – the long sentences sweep you on. And they work brilliantly in a book where characters are always in motion (even if sometimes the motion is mental). They walk, stumble, run errands, occasionally waddle, stalk, pursue, flee, but always move.
It’s as if the characters can’t stop for breath, so the text has to hold out for as long as it can without a full stop, and even longer for a bit of white space.
Page 78* occurs partway through the third paragraph/section, which unfolds from the point of view of Valuska, a kind of holy idiot and easily the book’s most sympathetic character. Valuska has been introduced doing his nightly routine at closing time in the Peafeffer tavern, in which he demonstrates the mechanics of a solar eclipse, deploying three paralytic drunks to represent the sun, the moon and the earth. His attempt to communicate the awe-inspiring order of the cosmos is tolerated by the drinkers as a way to delay closing time. At the top of this page, the evening is over and they walk out into the cold night:
The first thing to note about this page is that, counting the sentence that started on the previous page, there are just three sentences. The middle one is quite short: at 20 words it may be the shortest in the book, but is otherwise unremarkable. The others are typical of the book.
It would please my inner 11-year old Queenslander to analyse one of them – identify the main clause and the subsidiary clauses, and the nature of the subsidiary clauses. It probably wouldn’t be very entertaining for my readers, so I’ll limit myself to noting that the basic structure of this:
So they filed out in silence, and while the majority showed no particular desire for further entertainment, there was a couple here and there who, when Valuska bade them a warm good night at the door (it wasn’t possible to bid farewell to everyone, for some, particularly those who had been woken too suddenly and shoved out into the icy cold, were too busy throwing up against the outside wall), gazed after him as they had done the previous night and who knows how many nights before watching as he, still under the spell of his vision, proceeded on his way with that characteristically cramped gait of his, leaning forward, head bowed, puttering on tiny feet, almost breaking into a run (‘as if he had something important to do’) down the deserted street, and they sniggered behind their hands, and then, as he turned of by the water-tower, burst into loud and healthy laughter, for there wasn’t much else to laugh about – particularly these days, when driver, warehouseman, house-painter and baker all felt as if ‘time had somehow stopped’ – except Valuska, who, as they used to say, provided ‘free ’ntertainment’, not only with his act, but with his whole appearance, with those mild fawn-like eyes ever shining, that nose, so like a carrot in both colour and length, that postbag which never left his side, and that impossibly baggy coat thrown over that skinny body of his – all this was, in some strange fashion, invariably amusing and proved an eternal fount of rare good spirits
is five linked principal clauses:
So they filed out, and a couple gazed after him, and they sniggered, and then burst into laughter, for there wasn’t much else to laugh about.
That skeleton is adorned with images of the bitter cold, vaguely comic drinkers throwing up, descriptions of Valuska, an explanation of what they found amusing about him, and a reminder of the drinkers’ wider context – ‘driver, warehouseman, house painter and baker’.
Valuska stands out: time has ‘somehow stopped’ for the town in general, but he is fascinated by the continuous movement of the heavenly bodies and is himself always on the move. That stopped-ness comes into focus in chilling scenes in which the town square is full of motionless men, all as if waiting for something. And when they move, the effect is shocking, violent.
I don’t know that I’d recommend the book, but I enjoyed it, and it has stayed hauntingly in my mind. It makes many other books feel like plodding reportage.
After the meeting: This was one of the best meetings of the book group ever. We exchanged gifts – everyone was supposed to bring a book from their shelves, though the book I received (a Gary Disher title) is in suspiciously mint condition. Some of us read poems – by Adrian Mitchell, Mary Oliver, Simon Armitage and Robert Gray. We reminisced about the group’s history and argued about how firmly fixed our list of dates for the year should be. We shared stories of courage and shame. We ate well. We enjoyed the early summer evening. And we had a wonderfully animated discussion of the book.
Three out of eight of us had read the whole thing. A number of others were well under way and intend to finish it. Everyone had something to say. Here are some of my highlights.
I was reading Mrs Dalloway a couple of pages a day alongside of The Melancholy of Resistance, and felt strongly that the books spoke to each other but couldn’t say how. When someone mentioned the way the narrative focus transfers from one character to the next at the end of each section, I realised this is one of the similarities: where Virginia Woolf’s narrator slips from one character’s mind to another sometimes several times on a single page, Krasznahorkai’s narrator does a similar thing, but on a much wider arc.
One man read the book not realising it was more than 30 years old, and the political dimensions of it seemed right up to date. I don’t know if he mentioned the MAGA riots in January 2020, but they certainly seemed relevant.
Someone said it was hard to resist a book where a character spends four pages trying to work out the physics of hammering a nail while repeatedly hitting himself on the thumb. And then, having solved the problem by acting without thinking about it, he is told by his cleaning lady that he’s done it all wrong. Our group member who has been studying philosophy told us that this is even funnier when you know that one of Heidegger’s most famous passages involves a hammer. (That person’s favourite moment is Mr Eszter’s seemingly interminable rumination about the pointlessness of the diatonic scale (at least that’s what I think it’s about) – which was my second least favourite moment.)
Contrary to my own response, one man felt the book was intensely cinematic. And as we talked it was clear that it’s full of memorable scenes. We reminded each other of the scene where Valuska demonstrates the mechanics of an eclipse, the interrogation scene, the force with which Mrs Eszter’s hand comes down on Valuska’s shoulder to stop him from speaking, the horriific scene where the mob runs riot in the hospital, the brilliantly evoked streets full of frozen garbage, and more.
At heart, one man said, it’s a love story between Mr Eszter, an intellectual who has given up any hope that thinking could be of value, and naive, well-meaning Valuska.
And that’s a wrap for the Book Group for 2025.
The Book Group met on Gadigal land, and I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Geoff Page, Codicil, translated into Chinese by Chris Song and Matthew Cheng (Flying Island Books 2019)
It’s National Poetry Month in Australia. The Red Room Poetry site lists a plethora of events, workshops and competitions, promoted by ambassadors ranging from journalist Stan Grant to comedian Suren Jayemanne.
Codicil is the third book of poetry I’ve read so far in Poetry Month. I plan to read and blog about three more.
Geoff Page’s poetry has been around for a long time. I have an alarming number of anthologies of Australian poetry on my bookshelves, and his work appears in most of them, from Poet’s Choice (Island Press 1971, a limited, hand-set and -printed edition of 500 copies) to Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann 2016). His work is wonderfully accessible, using traditional forms without being trite or hidebound. For an intelligent discussion of his poetry, you’d find it hard to go past Martin Duwell’s review of his New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann 2013). The whole review is worth reading, but I’ll just quote his description of Page as ‘a public poet who reflects the social concerns of the time of the Bicentennial and into the first decade of the twenty-first century’, and as a writer of personal poems with the ‘dominant image of himself as an outsider in a family he loves’.
Duwell’s description fits Codicil, which includes some new poems and at least three of his most anthologised poems, ‘Smalltown Memorials‘ (1975), ‘Grit’ (1979) and ‘My Mother’s God‘ (1988) – the links are to recordings of Page reading the poems on the Poetry Archive website. What I take to be the most recent poems here deal with ageing and the approach of death – the title poem is instructions for the disposal of the poet’s ashes on the Clarence River, where he spent his childhood.
I imagine that the poems were selected by the translators, themselves accomplished poets in Hong Kong, with the intention of introducing Page’s work to Chinese readers. I wish I could read Chinese, because I’d love to know how they have dealt with the frequent Australian idioms and throwaway references. Like this from ‘Three Akubras’:
Three Akubras in a row my brothers underneath them standing at the saleyards there
Or this, from ‘Severance’, an imagined speech to an employee being sacked:
User Pays and Market Forces are all the rhet- oric you'll get.
(And what have they done with that weird hyphen that’s there for the sake of metre and rhyme?)
And I’d love to know what a Chinese reader might make of his occasional professions of allegiance to iambics, as in ‘I Think I Could Turn Awhile’, in which he imagines writing ‘like the Americans’, an heir to Whitman. But then:
I'd hear the clipped iambics calling, my template just beneath the line
For me, alas, the bilingual aspect of the book amounts to a purely visual effect – and it is fascinating to see what these very Australian poems look like in Chinese characters.
Here’s an image of pages 77 & 78*:
The poem, first published in Island magazine in September 2009, is neither a public poem dealing with issues of the day, nor a personal poem dealing directly with family or mortality. I read it as a letter to friends who are on a boat somewhere on the Baltic Sea, perhaps in response to a photo they have sent. Whatever, it’s a wonderful evocation of a still, moonless night on the water.
It’s almost a sonnet. The first eight lines paint the scene, and the almost perfectly regular iambic pentameters (de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum) enact the calm of the night.
Late August in the Baltic for Julie & Håkan
Late August in the Baltic and the night has got some darkness now. Tonight, no moon, no lid of cloud.
You're on the lee side of an island, one of those low Swedish mounds. You're in a bay not spelt in lights;
you wake at two and go on deck. The water is a black shellac;
Then there’s a turn, so gentle, in mid stanza with just a semicolon to mark it. The lines get shorter, and the literal elements of the poem – the island, the time of year, the deck, the absence of lights on shore – give way to more fanciful language:
the curvatures of heaven
continue underneath as now, at last, you see it.
Then the regular iambics re-establish themselves – as if a small wave of metaphor has momentarily disrupted the stillness of the poem, and it can now continue, but with a broader view:
The universe is all about you,
high above and far beneath. Such stillness will not be repeated. You're at the centre of the stars.
Pause for a moment to look at the second last line. Without it, the poem would have been a sonnet, and the bunching up of sibilants in ‘Such stillness’ strikes a dissonant note. I don’t think this is a flaw. What the line says – a warning not to expect life always to be like this – is unobtrusively reinforced by its comparative harshness and a faint sense that it disrupts the form. Whatever, it makes sure that what is to come in the last line is read as humbling rather than grandiose.
The last line gives us the word that has been implied but conspicuously missing from the first part of the poem: ‘stars’. It’s not completely irrelevant that this is the word that comes at the end of each book of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
We are at the centre of myriad points of light – not a narcissistic centre, but one who for this unrepeatable moment has a glimpse of the immensity and splendour of the cosmos. I’m reminded of Yayoi Kazuma’s infinity mirror rooms.
I’m in awe of Chris Song and Matthew Cheng for taking on the task of translating a poem that works so much through the rhythms and traditions of its native language.
I read Codicil on Wulgurukaba land, beautiful Yunbenun. I wrote the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those Nations, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Before the meeting: The Book Group’s designated chooser defied recent practice and chose a long book – 624 pages in my edition. I doggedly put in the time, and had read the book well before the meeting, only to realise that I was away from home on the night and couldn’t be there.
The club of the title is a group of exiles in 1950s Paris who meet in the back room of a bistro, mostly to play chess but also to share news of their homelands, and to argue fiercely about love, politics and life in general. One of the two main strands of the book is made up of their stories. Mostly they are without ID, even stateless refugees or defectors from the Soviet Union. One has actually been a friend of Stalin’s, who defected for love but remains faithful to the Soviet cause. The rest are dissidents or men (they are all men) who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jean-Paul Sartre is a member and kind of patron, though after a riveting scene in which he registers news of Camus’ death, he pretty much fades from the narrative.
We see the club and its members through the eyes of Michel Marini, a schoolboy who first visits the cafe to play desktop football (whose French name, ‘baby-foot’, trand). His coming of age story, against the backdrop of the Algerian War of Independence, is the other main narrative strand. Michel befriends Cécile, the girlfriend of his older brother, Frank. Frank bunks off to fight in Algeria, then disappears, only to reappear as a fugitive. Cécile calls Michel ‘little bro’, and neither she nor he realise that he is completely in love with her. Meanwhile, Michel’s parents’ marriage goes through tumultuous times.
It’s never dull, richly political and just as rich in its focus on the storms of adolescence. Yet the blurb describes it as a debut novel. Could this possibly be the work of a young person? I went looking and found that it’s not. According to Wikipedia, Jean-Michel Guenassia is almost as old as me, and was 59 when the book was published. He had in fact previously published one novel, and three TV screenplays and some plays had been produced. The Incorrigible Optimists Club is another example of an overnight sensation that was years in the making.
Euan Cameron’s English version is smooth, lively and engrossing.
Page 78* highlights elements of the book that didn’t feature in that quick overview. But they’re qualities that are important to the way the book draws the reader into the warm embrace of its imagined time and place.
We’re still getting to know Michel before he becomes involved with the Incorrigible Optimists, before the realities of the Algerian War intrude into his life, before his parents’ relationship becomes fully hostile. His father, a small businessman, has just bought a flash car – a DS 19 – and takes it for a spin with Michel in the passenger seat:
After a rough start, the car behaves like a midlife-crisis dream come true. We’ve been told that Michel’s father loves to impersonate the cool screen actors of the day, and that he is more or less despised by his wife’s upper-class parents, including Grandfather Philippe mentioned here. This paragraph reminds us of that tension, shows him having fun with his son, and at the same time fleshes out the soundtrack of the era. This kind of detail is what brings the narrative alive, even for readers (like me) who have vague to nonexistent knowledge of he singers and actors mentioned:
My father was the happiest man in the world. He began making fun of Grandfather Philippe, adopting the cheeky, mocking accent of Jean Gabin, whom he imitated wonderfully. I burst out laughing, and the more I laughed, the more he carried on. I was given the full repertory of Pierre Fresnay, Michel Simon and Tino Rossi. I had tears in my eyes. He switched on the radio. We were treated to a Brassens song. We took up the chorus: _ Les amoureux qui s’bécotent sur les bancs publics, bancs publics, _ bancs publics ont des p’tites gueules bien sympathiques.
Jean Gabin played Maigret in 1958. Pierre Fresnay was the suave Frenchman in La Grande Illusion. Michel Simon was described by Charlie Chaplin as the greatest actor in the world. Tino Rossi, like the others that Michel’s father impersonates, was feted as a film actor who supported the Resistance. Even without all the googling, you can tell that this is a moment when father and son are enjoying each other and loving life, singing together, and celebrating an anti-Fascist strand of French culture.
Here’s a YouTube of George Brassens singing ‘Les amoureux des bancs publiques’. The words don’t really matter, but they translate as ‘The lovers who kiss on public benches, public benches, public benches, have very friendly little mouths.’
Then there’s this:
On Christmas evening, my father had arranged a surprise for me. He took me to the Opéra de Paris. Since he had only had the idea at the las moment, he had paid a fortune for tickets at an agency. He dressed up for the occasion, and when I arrived in my creased suit, he looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Haven’t you got anything else to put on? We’re going to the Opéra.’ “It’s all I’ve got.’ ‘I’m going to tell your mother to buy you some things. Come on, we’re going to be late.’ We found ourselves in the upper circle, at the side. Despite his protests, I let him sit in the proper seat. I took the folding one. You had to dislocate your neck to get a view of the stage. The Opéra was packed, the women in evening gowns and the men in dinner jackets. He was excited. Even the programme was exorbitant. ‘Your grandfather would have given anything to see Rigoletto.’
This time Michel doesn’t share his father’s enthusiasm. The tiny incident, especially coming on the heels of the singing together with Georges Brassens, shows us the mutual affecrtion between father and son, as well as the distance that is growing between the generations, both of which become hugely important when the father disapproves of things done by Michel’s brother Frank but makes enormous sacrifices for him.
After the meeting: Sadly, I wasn’t there.
I wrote this blog post on Wulgurukaba land, the luxuriant island of Yunbenun, where cockatoos screech during the day and curlews serenade the night. I acknowledge the Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Alphonse Duchesne, who ran a small cafe/grocery in Normandy with his wife, died in 1967, two months after his daughter Annie Ernaux qualified as a school teacher, marking a transition in the family’s class status. On the train journey home from the funeral, Ernaux writes:
I tried to keep my son entertained so that he would behave himself. People travelling first-class have no time for noise and restless children. I suddenly realised with astonishment, ‘Now I really am bourgeois,’ and ‘It’s too late.’ (Page 18)
Later that summer, she thought to herself, ‘One day I shall have to explain all this,’ meaning she needed to write about her father and the distance that had come between them during her adolescence: ‘Although it had something to do with class, it was different, indefinable. Like fractured love.’
This short book – just 64 pages – is a rigorous, spare and unsparing, attempt to rise to that need. In 1982, having already written three novels, Ernaux set out to write a fourth one, about her father. But, she writes:
I realise now that a novel is out of the question. In order to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach, or attempt to produce something ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’. I shall collate my father’s words, tastes and mannerisms, the main events of his life, all the external evidence of his existence, an existence which I too shared.
The book tells two stories: the life story of Ernaux’s father and – always in the present tense as if allowing us to look over her shoulder as she types – the self-reflexive story of the writing of the book.
The father was from a peasant background. His own father was illiterate, and he worked first as a farm hand, then as a factory worker and finally, along with his wife, ran the small grocery shop and café. He bickered with his wife, spoke a rustic version of French, never set foot in a museum, voted for reactionary politicians ‘for a lark, but without conviction’, was intensely proud of his daughter’s success in moving into the middle class but didn’t make any part of the transition with her.
Every now and then, Ernaux steps directly into the frame to say how long she has now been writing, explain that it is a slow process because she is avoiding her own emotional memories in order to focus on her father’s story. It’s not that she doesn’t draw on memory – as for example when she describes a photo of her father taken at her wedding reception, and recalls her sense of him at the moment it was taken, ‘certain that he wasn’t enjoying himself’. And through it all, told in flat unemotive language, the terrible undertow of the daughter moving away into a different world:
One day he said, ‘Books and music are all right for you. I don’t need them to live.’
This was the first of Annie Ernaux’s ‘autobiosociological’ books. It’s the fourth I’ve read, and with each one I become more grateful to the Nobel committee for drawing her to my attention. The others (with links to my blog posts) are:
After the meeting: I was a little apprehensive about this meeting, as I had picked the book. The job was sprung on me at the last meeting, it had to be a short book, and this was on my TBR list, so I named it on the spot without due consideration.
It turned out that, quite apart from the big plus of brevity, the book was generally much liked, and we had a discussion that made me glad all over again to be in the book group. At times the discussion was personal: one man honed in on the early part of the narrative when the family’s life was disrupted terribly by the bombing of Normandy in World War Two (a part of the narrative that had passed me by); a number of us drew parallels with the trajectories of our own lives – as the first generation in our families to go to university; and the conversation wandered, seemingly off-topic, to our relationships to our parents, and various ways in which the stories of different parents had been discovered and even published.
We had a wonderful difference of opinion. One man, call him K–, himself a recently retired small businessman, said that Annie Ernaux had completely failed to get that her father, as a small businessman, had made a life for himself that he was completely happy with: when Ernaux portrays him as ashamed of his lack of ‘culture’, that is complete projection. I must be just a little bit in love with Annie Ernaux because my defensive hackles went up, and I disagreed that the father was portrayed as anything other than happy with his life!
The back cover blurb of the Ftzcarraldo edition says that ‘Ernaux reveals the shame that haunted him throughout his life’. So K– isn’t alone in reading the book that way. I still disagree. But I’ve been reflecting for days, and while I still think K– was wrong, I believe he put his finger on something at the heart of the book.
There’s no doubt that Annie the character believed that she had a better life than her parents, that they were proud she had made the transition, that a gulf of mutual incomprehension developed between the generations. The father certainly feels shame in some social situations – not understanding what a school teacher means by ‘town clothes’, not being able to spell when filling out a form. It’s explicit that the people of the daughter’s world look on people like her father with scorn. But I don’t read Ernaux or her father as sharing their judgement. She lays out the detail of his world, and is pretty clear about her own ‘bourgeois’ perspective. When she mentions in passing that he votes for a reactionary politician ‘for a lark’, it’s clear that she disapproves, but her disapproval isn’t the point.
K– went hunting for passages to support his reading. His case doesn’t stand or fall by one tiny sample, but what he came up with was this, from when the 20-something Annie is visiting her parents:
As soon as I plugged in the bedside lamp, the wire blackened, sparks flew and the bulb went out. The lamp was in the shape of a ball resting on a marble base, with a brass rabbit standing upright, its front paws sicking out at its sides. I had once thought it very beautiful. It must have been broken for ages. Indifferent to things, they never got anything mended at home.
K– read the tone of that last sentence as something close to contempt: ‘These people are barely human, they care so little for their environment.’ I read it as more two-edged: ‘As the kind of person who travels first-class, I expect my things to function well and to meet certain aesthetic standards. My parents have different priorities, a much greater tolerance for imperfection.’
I’m going to reread the book.
The Book Group met on the land of Gadigal of the Eora nation. I wrote this blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the many generations of Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country.
Before the meeting: It’s unlikely that the group would have read The Visionaries if we chose books by consensus. But The Chooser has spoken and we’re out of our comfort zones.
It’s a hard book to describe. Without anything by way of preamble or general argument, it plunges straight into its story. The first chapter, ‘Sparks: 1943’, introduces the book’s four subjects: four quite different women writers, each heroic in her own way, poised to take a major leap forward In the midst of the horrors of the Second World War. As with each of the book’s eight chapters and Coda, the chapter is subtitled:
Beauvoir is in the mood, Weil in a trance, Rand in a fury, and Arendt in a nightmare.
And the four philosophers are introduced:
Simone de Beauvoir, aged 35, is in occupied France in her famously unconventional ‘family’ with Jean-Paul Sartre, with ‘better things to do than worry about the judgment of that petit-bourgeois fascist’ (that is, Adolf Hitler): she is on the brink of ‘a new definition of man (sic!) as an acting creature. And one that was neither empty of content, as in Sartre’s latest work, nor bound to remain absurd, as in Camus’s writing.’
Simone Weil, 34, is in London, desperately ill and in pain, but lobbying for the creation of ‘a special unit of French nurses at the front who would be deployed only in the most dangerous places, to provide first aid in the middle of battle’. She would head this unit personally, in what looks awfully like a plan to commit suicide by altruism. De Gaulle dismisses the proposal out of hand: ‘She is mad!’ Instead she writes urgently and copiously, including ‘a 300-page redesign of the cultural existence of humanity in the modern age’ before collapsing in exhaustion.
After ten years as a freelance writer in New York City, Ayn Rand, 37, sees the publication of her 700-page novel, The Fountainhead, and launches her passionate espousal of independence, her worldview that saw altruism as the great destructive force.
Hannah Arendt, 36, also in New York, has been driven out of Hitler’s Germany, and is now finding in herself the courage to face the reality of the industrialised murder of millions of Jews. What mattered was ‘to be entirely present’, or, as paraphrased by Eilenberger, ‘to philosophise’.
In the following chapters, Eilenberger tells us the story of the life and work of each of these four women over the preceding decade. It’s left to the reader to discern any unifying theme or concern. In my reading, the closest he comes to articulating a central theme is on page 69:
The philosophising person seems to be essentially a pariah of deviant insights, the prophet of a life lived rightly, whose traces can be found and deciphered even in the deepest falsity. At least this is one way to understand the role that Ayn Rand as well as her contemporaries Weil, Arendt and Beauvoir assumed with ever greater confidence. Not that they had expressly made a choice. They simply experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been. And deep inside they remained certain of who or what the problem needing treatment was: not themselves, but the Others. Possibly, in fact – all the Others.
If one were to pursue that view, the actual impulse of astonishment at the beginning of all philosophising is not the surprise that there is ‘something and not nothing’, but rather, honest bafflement that other people live as they do.
If I understand this correctly, part of what he is saying is that whereas their male colleagues were interested in the individual human being in relation to the world, these four women were interested in human beings in relationship to each other.
It may be that what you find in any book depends on what you bring to it. A reader well-versed in 20th century philosophy would read this one differently from me: it seems that each of these women was pushed to the margins of political and philosophical thinking, and this book is part of a movement to rectify that. But I’m not that well-versed reader. I haven’t read a whole work by any of them, but I’ve known about all four in a general way.
In my mental landscape, Simone Weil is a weirdly saintly figure who embraced suffering (and loved one of my own favourite poems, as I blogged recently), a Jew who was lived her own intense version of non-Church Christianity; Ayn Rand is a demonic figure who celebrated and justified libertarian capitalism; Simone de Beauvoir is Jean-Paul Sartre’s devoted lover who wrote The Second Sex, a key text of second-wave feminism; and Hannah Arendt is a woman of extraordinary integrity who coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ and wrote about totalitarianism.
This book leaves those thumbnail sketches pretty much in place, but I now have a much richer understanding of the people and their works. I didn’t know, for instance, that Simone Weil had worked as a trade union organiser and had brilliant political insights, that Simone de Beauvoir had such a complex set of intimate relationships, that Ayn Rand was married and counted on her husband Frank O’Connor while she wrote fiercely about independence (and that ‘Ayn’ rhymes with ‘fine’), or that Hannah Arendt was quite so marvellous a human being as she appears in these pages.
Their stories are told independently, but Eilenberger makes occasional telling comparisons, and sometimes the women’s paths cross. I love the meeting between the two Simones on page 55, quoted from Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter:
I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped. Our relations ended right there.
And on page 190, the moment that has stayed with me as a piece of wisdom to live by – far from the self-abnegation of Simone Weil or the grand existentialist abstraction of de Beauvoir. Hannah Arendt, Eilenberger writes, is ‘laying the foundation of her own ethics of true self-determination in the face of the Other’:
Gratitude, for the existence of other people in the world, and active concern, for their always given vulnerability, are for Arendt the two true sources of our moral life. And it is no coincidence … that these two predispositions are the very ones that are essentially alien to Ayn Rand’s superhuman ideal figure, Howard Roark.
Amid all the egotism, altruism, self-sacrifice, angst, ambition, bitterness, sweetness, ruthlessness, pain, of those brilliant young adult lives, the notion that gratitude and concern are central went straight to my heart.
After the meeting: Usually, we spend quite a bit of time chatting before turning to the book of the night, but this time we were into it before we even sat down. The food was, as always, excellent. Our host had done a huge tray of roast vegetables and the contributions of the other five of us, with minimal advance coordination, worked well. He Who Usually Brings Dessert was on the other side of the continent, but it was someone’s birthday, and we had cake.
Though the book took us well outside our collective comfort zone, I think we were all glad to have read it. Most enjoyed it for the history, and tended to skip the philosophy. One of us is doing a philosophy course with the University of the Third Age, and had read Wolfram Eilenberger’s previous book, Time of the Magicians, about four male 20th century philosophers. He gave a couple of mini-lectures that cast light, gratefully received, on some of our dark places.
We had three different readings of ‘the Salvation of philosophy’ in the subtitle: these four women were saved by philosophy in times of extreme hardship; they saved philosophy from the dried-up mainstream by focusing on the connections among people; in the terrible time of the Second World War and Nazi atrocities, they kept the flame of philosophical thinking alive. Maybe all three are correct. (I’ve just seen the subtitle of the original is Die Rettung der Philosophie in finsteren Zeiten (1933-1943), literally The Salvation of Philosophy in Dark Times (1933–1943). And the title itself is Feuer der Freiheit – Fire of Freedom. It’s kind of intriguing that the four woman aren’t named, and there’s not even a hint that the book focuses on particular women. I wonder how much that change of packaging influences out reading.)
A couple of guys took against Simone de Beauvoir. I tried to defend her, and was supported by someone drawing a comparison between her and one of the participants in Australian Survivor that was as obscure to me as the extracts from Simone Weil’s journals. Incidentally, I now know how to pronounce Weil (it’s VAY).
We were in awe at how young the four women were in the years covered by the book. Some were pretty sure that Simone de Beauvoir’s entanglement with a student would get her fired and publicly shamed these days. It was a revelation that for de Beauvoir the war at times barely disturbed her way of life (someone had been to see the Anne Dangar exhibition in Canberra and had a similar revelation – ‘Oh yes, Hitler’s doing all that stuff,’ the artists in France said to each other, ‘but cubism is so interesting.’) It was pointed out that two of the four women were novelists rather than philosophers as such. Someone thought Hannah Arendt was a bit dull (I was shocked). Some were surprised to find themselves feeling sympathy for Ayn Rand (I was ashamed).
We barely talked about Donald Trump. I hope he noticed the lack of attention.
Me fail? I fly! 