Apes and monkeys

I read Rose Tremain's The way I found her (Vintage 1998) because I wanted something to clear my mind after the upset of reading Appelfeld (see previous post). She seems to me an author who writes well and wouldn't involve my emotions too much.

It is a strange book, a bit lopsided in its structure, but it does keep you turning the pages and it does pack a bit of a wallop towards the end, with a stunning description of two people being kept hostage - a situation she could not possibly have experienced herself. Altogether, the book is a tour de force, as the protagonist is male and an adolescent male to boot. One of the many intertwining elements of the rich story is his sexual awakening. She manages to describe frantic adolescent lust without being off-putting or deriding the boy. Most of the characters' sexuality is a part of the story, as in real life. Not everything is clearly spelled out, and one is required to think things through a bit, something I always enjoy. The boy reads Le Grand Meaulne, and Crime and Punishment, and comments on parallels between the novels and his own life. He worries about plagiarism, there being a novel in the process of being written, in the novel.

I lay in bed last night and reviewed the book in my mind, considering how the play of different elements. I did have the impression that she had toured Paris pen in hand and transferred everything she saw and experienced to the book. Very detailed, sometimes unnecessarily so.

She mentions orang utangs in the beginning, by which the writer in the story means readers without discernment, and later the symbol comes back, with kidnappers wearing monkey masks. (I know, orang utangs are not monkeys, but the apes and monkeys are pretty close in most people's minds.) Some symmetries seemed contrived when I thought more about them, but that only bothered me a little.

The boy's thoughts are fresh and funny: he takes a beautiful dog for walks every day. It's 'like being Arthur Miller out with Marilyn Monroe' - everyone recognises the dog. Yes, I do think that is an older person's comment rather than a young boy's. This happens more than once, for instance when he notices a woman's 'expensive perfume' - the 'expensive' is not the thought of a 13-year old. He is more realistic in his surprise when he finds out that lipstick colours have individual names.

Too much grief

Someone told me that one of my Nuremberg stories contains too much grief, it is sadness piled upon sadness. I can see what they mean: who wants to read stuff that is about grief and that's it?

The novel is like that too: the beginning is the most powerful, about the injustice and pain, the betrayals and losses. My mentor suggests that I turn it round - the past as flashbacks, seen from a place of safety. The reader is told that the people will escape. Whenever I think about it, it seems unbelievable that they did. I wonder what was special about them. Maybe it was just luck. Four members of one family each navigating across murderous currents by whatever means of salvation available. I can't do anything much today. I shall write and write and see what arises.

I have read Aharon Appelfeld's The Story of a Life (Schocken Books, NY, 2004) translated from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter. She does an excellent job of it. The novel told me something I didn't know, or only knew confusedly: the effect of the period immediately preceding the Six Day War on those who had been victims of the Second World War.

After the war broke out, my parents drove all the way from the North to the South of Israel to visit me, because 'Your mother needed to see you', said my father. I was a young soldier guarding a settlement near Gaza, my focus was on adapting to the new Israeli culture, learning Hebrew, learning about the army, everything at once, my head and my heart in a whirl. I missed childhood friends left behind in Europe. I was still a child myself. But around me, everyone was amazed that they had made the trip.

Appelfeld belonged to a club of survivors from Galicia and Eastern Europe.

 "I was called up for reserve duty., and club members vied with one another excitedly to show their support. People pushed banknotes into my pockets, and one of the less popular members (in part because of his miserliness) actually took off his gold watch, gave it to me, and said, "In my name and in the name of my family". Later I learned that this watch had belonged to his brother, who perished in Auschwitz."

 "Be Shmi U Be Shmi Mishpachti." A blessing - implying May your arm be strong and mighty against those who wish to destroy us. It must have seemed unbelievable that we might survive. I don't recall giving it a thought.

I have just realised that I was reading this book yesterday, on June 6th.It portrays the effect of war-time experiences on children with power and accuracy. No amplification. I found it very moving.

Heaven and Hell

The Cove (Canongate, 2012) was written by Ron Rash, a well-known Appalachian American. It is a superbly written story - thrilling, though a little unbelievable, almost a fairy tale, a Grimm fairy tale; yet one finishes the book with a feeling of lightness. The mute man's secret dawns on you gradually, you form your own theory about him and find out the truth at the end, which is also a beginning for one person. The heroine is a kind of saint and would be insipid except that we see her develop and gain the strength to hold up a mirror to her tormentors. She walks home with a difficult decision to make and pauses at a cross-roads to think. We know that this spot is dangerous -  a wild boar is around whom someone called Jehosaphat....The pigs on the farm are also portrayed as evil, there is an unspoken idea that they might be man-eating. The good is represented in the flock of beautiful singing birds which is shot down...

Heaven and hell are present right through the book, whether in the experiences people have to go through - war wounds, dreadful isolation in a dark house, digging at the bottom of a well (some of the best writing here), being wonderfully in love - or on board a great ship where heaven and hell are represented in a kind of festival.

At the end of an early chapter, the final sentence glows unexpectedly: "The word was not there." A Biblical intonation: no God. The uprooting of a great tree releases a ball of writhing snakes, a vision from hell. And towards the end, a man hides in the forest, and sees a stag with great antlers, which he thinks at first might be an hallucination. There has been no previous mention of stags - so is the stag a representation of Christ, I wonder...It fits, like a complex jigsaw puzzle.

Almost every page contains a word which is not common usage, understandable from the context. Most can be found in the dictionary and a couple are identified as 'American idiom'. The use of strange words and strange sentence constructions gives one the feeling of peering into a different world. Wikipedia lists Appalachian English as a dialect - not written much. Being fluent in another language than English may be an advantage for a writer: they can borrow metaphors which may be as telling in translation as in the original. and the knowledge of a different grammar and syntax enables the use of English in new ways - they know how the sentence works elsewhere.

I am always interested in the names authors choose for their characters, and discovered that those in this book bear genuine Appalachian names, including the villain, Chauncey. (I'd never come across a Chauncey before). The little town of Mars Hill exists in real life, as does its college. The narrative takes place about a century ago, after the First World War, which places the story safely beyond living memory. I wonder what the locals make of the way their town is portrayed.


 Thank you, Ron Rash. A great book.

Names in novels - a view according to Echenoz

I enjoy the names Echenoz gives his charactes in Big Blondes (1997, translation with occasional clumsiness by Mark Polizzotti, The New Press) (Les Grandes Blondes, 1995, Editions de Minuit) and while checking whether one in particular was a total fiction or existed in reality (Personnettaz - so weird, and yes, it is a real name), came across a review in Liberation entirely dedicated to this topic, which you'll find here (in French). Echenoz compiles lists of names he likes as he comes across them, before he may need them. They may not always be the names of actual people: he finds them anywhere - in the train or on the entrance to a factory.

He says: "Reading Henry James' Notebooks, I was struck by the list of names he kept in reserve."
He likes names that work in several languages and over several periods, that have belonged to a variety of people - Arbogast (the heroine's family name in Big Blondes) was the name of a bishop in the 5th century, a general under Theodosius [Roman emperor, 347-395], a French mathematician in the 18th century and the name of the detective in Psycho. First names matter too - they add something, though he says that he is incapable of explaining why the sexy active girl in Big Blondes is called Donatienne, an uncommon name - the name came to him and that is who she was - no question.

Each name is different from all the others and conjures up a specific personality: the reader has no difficulty in remembering who they are.

In Echenoz's following book, Piano (also translated by Polizzotti) one finds that he has been unable to let go of two of the names so carefully chosen and that they reappear, one of them with a wink to his previous incarnation. That book was reviewed in the Independent.

I shall write more when I've finished reading Big Blondes - about the use and practice of irony, which ties in with Vila-Matas' book about Never any end to Paris...

Not a biography

Echenoz's book about Emil Zapotek is called Courir in French and Running in English, with the subtitle Un roman - A novel, published in 2008 by Editions de Minuit, Linda Coverdale's translation appearing a year later under the imprint of The New Press.

It is the story of Zapotek and of Czechslovakia and its people, during a difficult time. Emil Zapotek loved running and loved his country. He was the fastest man on earth (long-distance) for some 6 years or so, winning many Olympic medals. Gentle Emil often smiled and found it hard to say No to people's requests. He saw himself as an ordinary man and remained matter of fact and humble despite his success, becoming a most loved figure in Czechoslovakia.

Like most people of my generation, I recognise the name Zapotek from my childhood. He was world-famous. The Czechs seem to have the rare ability to produce wonderful people, and to recognise and honour them. I am thinking of another Czech hero, Vaclav Havel. Apart from that, I am not very knowledgeable about the Czechs.

When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in the 50s, and put a stop to the Prague Spring (this was Dubcek's time), Zapotek, then in his forties, spoke up at a protest rally and said that the URSS should be boycotted at the Olympics in Mexico (I remember that happening). He was stripped of his rank as a colonel in the Czech army, lost his job, was banished from Prague and sent to work in a dangerously radioactive mine. After he had been there for some six years, the apparatchiks thought it would be a good idea to humiliate him by giving him work as a garbage collector in Prague. 

The crew he was assigned to refused to let him handle the garbage, and he simply ran behind the truck, while the people hung out of the windows applauding him and bringing the garbage to the truck themselves, so that in the end the authorities recognised their failure and made him a filing clerk somewhere obscure...He had a loving wife called Dana. During the time in the mine he managed to escape three times to visit her in Prague.

This is a story about a person who existed, yet Echenoz describes it as a novel. There is no reference to his sources. He has chosen to leave out many things. There are no years/dates, no listing of the times Zapotek achieved, no clear description of his training method - we learn that the next person to finish a race took 20 minutes longer, or that he was the first man to run 20 km in under an hour...Echenoz calls him Emil - the name Zapotek only occurs 3 times in the entire book, the first time on p. 80 (out of 122). The other names are his wife's, those of a few other runners, and of a couple of statesmen. Also: no quotation marks for speech. There isn't much speech anyway.

The story unfolds chronologically, with few flashbacks. The language tends to be calm, moderate. The words everybody, everywhere are used often - the word everyman seems to be waiting in the wings. This is how good an ordinary human being can be.

An unkind moment

Read The Forrests by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Circus, 2012). Beautifully written, artful, creative.

Children who believe they are neglected. The effect of poverty.

For me, not enough.
I couldn't really care for the characters. Nothing develops very much, except that people grow wiser as they age. Their names are undifferentiated, bland.

There is one aha moment. One.
Maybe I missed something, because some are suggesting it might be a Booker Prize winner.
Well.
The style is good enough, for sure.

Maybe I'm just unkind.

The real thing

Finished reading Patricia Grace's Potiki last week. I've read several of her books, but this is the first time that her writing touched me: even though there were things I didn't understand, magical events, people with special powers, it showed me a Maori point of view, and some of it at least I understood.

I met Patricia Grace a few years ago, not that she would remember me. I was a member of a group of manuhiri arriving at her marae, and she was in the line of those who welcomed us in the traditional way, nose to nose, breath mingling with breath. We were students and the teacher who brought us to meet Patricia was - is - a respected Maori writer, whose mana opened the doors to this other world. (Maybe I'm wrong and they would have opened anyway - I am remembering how worn-out the whanau were by all the visitors they received. But that's a different story.)

When I met Patricia Grace, I didn't know it was her, but I became aware of her because her blue eyes are so penetrating, like suddenly being drenched in water, or in the sudden beam of a powerful searchlight - shocking, all the more so for being unexpected. She doesn't  peer or scrutinise in a searching way; on the contrary, she is reserved, quiet, modest. But her gaze seemed all-seeing.

I felt wanting. That is what I remember: she was unimpressed and I would have liked to say something, do something to impress her. That did not happen, quite the contrary, I remember I was unhappy about something on the marae, and it seemed to me she disapproved.

I have read some of her previous books and they left no trace in me, until this one, this Potiki.

So this is the book that made her famous: now I understand why people respect her. Here is wonderful writing - a personal truth, in the framework of historical events and characters which one grows to understand and feel with deeply.