Forms of evil

I have read two contrasting books: one was by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Old Child and The Book of Words (two novellas in one book) and the other J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians.

I started Coetzee's book last night and read until my eyes closed, woke up early, and plunged straight back into it, with a feeling of relief and pleasure, because I loved the central character so much.

He's the Magistrate (no name) and runs a small outpost, a little town, on the frontier of an Empire. A Secret Service man arrives in the first paragraph and from there it is downhill all the way. What can be done about  paranoia and abuse of power?

Not a depressing book, on the contrary. I loved it.

Jenny Erpenbeck writes very very well, but her book was troublesome.  Finishing the first novella - The Old Child - I felt the need for a shower, to wash off something evil ...The world described reminded me of Elfriede Jelinek's descriptions of Austria - which I could not read for long either. A world lacking kindness, lacking soul. The Child does her best to cope. It is unrelenting.

Both Jelinek and Erpenbeck are Austrian. The friend who lent me this book said that Erpenbeck's second novella, the Book of Words, was troublesome for her...I didn't dare read it.

The Pressure of Sunlight Falling

Fiona Pardington is a New Zealand photographer whose work I like. I know of her from two projects: one was a series of large colour photographs of museum store-rooms: stuffed birds, furniture, walls hung with wooden Maori objects - I remember long wooden poles - were they paddles? The efficiency and cleanliness with which they are stored is shown - harmony, a sense of permanence, soothing for the heart.

The later works I saw were part of an exhibition at the City Art Gallery. I attended an introductory evening. We sat on untrustworthy folding chairs, aluminium tubing and white plastic, rows and rows of us. In front, they were talking to us and showing us things. But on the white walls on either side, there hung four big portraits, two on our left and two on our right, FP's work. Their silent presence dominated the event.

The photographs were of live casts (plaster casts): one of a tattooed Maori man's head, and one the head of a Pacific Islands man - I think. (It's hard to remember exactly now that I've seen more in the book.) The photos show the front and the back of their head individually, in black and white. One of the heads was stained dark, photographed against a pale background. The other was pale, I think. The photos were as wide as a door, not as high. The eyes were shut, of course. I spent time looking at them.

They made me very curious. They were real people. I felt as if they might open their eyes and laugh out loud any minute. But the neck ends in a plinth: it wasn't a photo of a real person, the real person was at one remove from what had been photographed. I had to remind myself of this several times.

I saw a book about FP on display at the Central Library sometime later, and took it home. The title is Fiona Pardington: The Pressure of Sunlight Falling by Kriselle Baker (Otago University Press, 2011). It includes the photographs and a collection of good articles about them. Fiona P found out as an adult that she is part Maori. One of the heads is of a person who is related to her - she could tell by the moko. I imagine the sense of something coming right when she met him, a sense of completion.  He was stored at the Musee du Quay Branly in Paris. I don't know if he is still there now. They repatriate the real heads; I don't know if they tried to get these back too.


The book includes many photos of casts of heads from a variety of Pacific nations, and they have the dreamy real-life quality I tried to describe above. Except for the photos of Dumont d'Urville's - the French scientist  who had the casts made and took them back to France- and the casts of his family, which are a dirty white on a grey background and look somehow pinched and tight. I couldn't get over the difference. D'Urville must have been a person beyond the norm, an exceptional man,  to carry out the sort of research he did, to convince people to go along with what must have been rather an uncomfortable procedure. That is not how he comes across in the cast. His children look young and innocent, as you'd expect. 

I read several of the articles, which was satisfying. (In particular David Elliot, the curator.) But the one that mattered most was  Kriselle's essay describing FP at work, the care, the immense trouble taken with the lighting...

I checked the photos again and realised that FP had not taken the photos of Dumont D'Urville and his family: they are labelled as coming from the Musee.

I suppose all artifacts are photographed for the record, and the photos of the casts of D'Urville and his children are equivalent to a photo from one of those booths in railway stations where you can get your photo taken in a few minutes.

It turns out that FP chose the title, from a description of what happens to objects in space...I hope I have got all of this right, I have already returned the book to the library and could not check everything. It is a wonderful book.

Enduring

Slowly reading Shakespeare's Henry V (after seeing the Kenneth Branagh film) and enjoying it - We band of brothers, we happy few...and alternating - this is bedtime reading -  with reading about Shackelton and his last trip to Antartica - (The Endurance, Shackelton's legendary Antarctic expedition, Alfred A. Knopf 1999).

None of my education took place in English, so never studied Shakespeare. I've tried to read him in the past, but only now is my command of English good enough to cope. Here is one word I loved: womby -  we would say something like womb-like nowadays...I search an old dictionary for some of the words I don't know and they are mostly there, whereas more modern words usually don't feature.


Something interesting: Shackelton, who was gifted with great leadership qualities and was mostly revered by his men (except for the grumpy, exceptionally skilled chippy McNish) felt threatened by one man and therefore kept him close to himself: the clever daring photographer Frank Hurley, also endowed with leadership qualities. Shackelton did not trust him. The two other men who helped run the expedition were loyal beyond questioning.The fantastic photos are the originals are Hurley's originals.The story reads easily and fast.

It is very harrowing: I've reached the point where they are in open boats after the ship sank. They had spent many months on an icefloe, sometimes having to watch all night in case it broke up and they were separated from their provisions and their goods. They slept in tents which were very thin, so thin that the wind could blow the cigarette smoke about inside them; they had no waterproof tent liners to lie on, no real protection. They had used igloos before - could they not build them now? The book is by Caroline Alexander and she evokes the atmosphere very well - so well that I've decided not to read the book just before going to sleep.

I lie awake and wonder: how did they arrange the toilets when they were on the floe? People only seem to suffer from sciatica - not diarrhea or digestive upsets, despite the odd food (penguin meat) - and they lie down for long periods because of it. They were together there for so long, what about homosexuality? There were 27 of them, so statistically there should have been 2 or three...

The link between Henry V and Shackelton's expedition is happiness: a strange bird, this happiness, who knows what makes it alight. One man - Lee - wrote in his diary about feeling extremely happy - and is described as a loner. I wonder if being stuck on an icefloe meant that he was at last part of a group even though they used his snoring as a pretext to get him out of one of the tents and make him sleep in the supplies hut...He was acutely aware of the food shortages and so was under no illusions.

France today a la Houellebecq

Visitors and writing don't mix, despite strenuous efforts. Neither do events like the annual Passover ritual of the Seder. Our household will only tolerate a Humanist Haggadah (a Godless one) and the one I've downloaded for us to use is so limp as to have no impact on readers. T and I immediately set about correcting it with the help of the old Progressive Haggadah, finding the bits that would be acceptable to our atheists and inserting them where we could. Every now and then T would say something which I thought  worth writing down as well, and I think that we might in due course make our own Haggadah, rewrite it at the seder and make something with more oomph and less political correctness. One can be oomphy and still offend no one, there is no need to crawl and creep around.

The discipline of writing was rewarding as managed to do some for my own book which I am pleased with. Today there was no time due to preparations for the Seder. But got home early thinking about writing and managed to squeeze this in.

The author I have been obsessed with over the last four days is Michel Houellebecq, winner of the 2010 Prix Goncourt for his book, La carte et le territoire (Flammarion, 2010)- published in English as The map and the Territory (translated by Gavin Bowd, Knopf). A review was published in the Canadian Globe and mail which explains the controversy around him well. Houellebecq's reader is given an insight into the way France is now - different from how I remember it from my childhood many years ago. The insights he provides document the status quo, a little as if he were a friend arriving with news he knows I'll want to know.

What kind of thing? That only 10% of the people staying at French tourist hotels are actually French, many of the visitors are Chinese and Russian. The French can no longer afford their own hotels. (P said glumly - I suppose that will be true in the UK as well). That there are areas of Paris where the police dare not go because gangs have taken over. I have heard since that he calls Islam a 'stupid' religion - or was it 'idiotic'? I'd like to read the piece where he says that, to find out why.


Some of the patterns of modern life he describes are familiar, and those ring true, so I am inclined to believe the rest as well. I also very much like his style of writing, which takes the back step, so that you can concentrate on the content or rather listen easily to his light voice telling you a story you want more of.

Am now reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Slow and fast (Farar Straus & Giroux, 2011). A thick tome, reads marvelously - no effort involved, though one is aware of being shown things and being made to think.

On religion

Finished Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel (Free Press, 2008) and couldn't sleep afterwards. Not because of the description of brutal genital mutilation in an early chapter.

What particularly stayed with me was the clear-sighted description of life in Europe, from the point of view of a newly-arrived Muslim person. I believe that Holland is a particularly advanced and open society (having lived and worked there for six years). She witnesses the mostly calm and measured way in which ordinary people air their differences and resolve them. In her experience until then, hierarchy enforced its wishes violently - her mother for instance beat her and her sister relentlessly. People - women in particular - seemed powerless to effect any change in their lives.

There is a beautiful moment when she refuses to marry a man and her statement to a Court that it is her soul which refuses the union, is unexpectedly respected by a senior Muslim man - what an amazing liberation this must have been for her. This official reappears later, and again acts in a beneficial way - and he is unique in the narrative, the single Muslim person capable of ethical, thoughtful conduct. I am sure he is not in fact the only one, but there does not seem to exist any education or modelling within the ambit of most people around Ayaan at the time she lived in Muslim countries which would enable them to grow into such a person. Her mother for instance does not cope with life: she is tormented and explosive.

Ayaan documents her slow move away from Islam. It happens little by little, and the book portrays it most believably. Having finished reading it, I thought about Islam and how dangerous extremism is, and then realised - as if it was an entirely new thought - that this was true of all religions.

I felt as if I'd been led by the hand and given an education. It is not that I haven't thought about this often - it is a topic of frequent discussion in our home. But here I had reached a clear conclusion. It is a very good book. She is an impressive woman.

Getting it wrong

Something to think about - my son just sent it to me. It is  read out by the author here.

Another sense of an ending,
(after Julian Barnes)

by Sam Gwynn
(born 1948)

It's pestered you for years and years,
Your private little worrywart
Like something buzzing in your ears,
Some static-tattered last report
From someone in the pockmarked fort
You'd never trusted all along--
The shitty, sentimental sort.
Suppose you got the whole thing wrong.

It's aggravating, like the lead
--Eberhard Faber, #2--
You'll carry (till you're done and dead!)
In your left palm. It's part of you.
It fits you like a worn-out shoe;
It's part of what you bring along:
Your baggage, and you think it's true.
Suppose you got the whole thing wrong.

Suppose the words were insincere.
Suppose you never got the joke.
Suppose you really were veneer
But sold yourself as vintage oak.
Suppose you suddenly awoke
To hear the real words of the song.
Suppose you spoke but never spoke.

Suppose you got the whole thing wrong.

In short, the short is what you are,
And short is always less than long,
And near is never more than far.
Suppose you got the whole thing wrong.

The End of the Land?

I've read David Grossman in the past - not always easily: literature, not entertainment.

Again a book about ending, about life and death.

I was given his latest book,To The End of the Land, in a small paperback edition, with a flowery cover, poppies, I think, a cheerful red. Then I spotted the book elsewhere, in the Jonathan Cape edition. It is larger, easier to read. On the black and white cover, a deep window-less aperture in a stone wall - an abandoned Arab house on the Golan Heights ? - frames the small silhouettes of a couple, a man and a woman, seen against a white sky. I bought that book, traded the other one in.


I can understand the flowers, but not forgive them. I noticed the same kitchiness on the cover of Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness: the copy I'd bought showed a young boy reclining in a field with a book, in a golden glow. As if the illustrator had been told - 'Reminiscences of boyhood' - and nothing else. Friends owned a hard-cover version by a different publisher, with a dull photo of a young boy walking by peeling walls in a city, the photo carrying a sense of menace. Much better. My copy has disappeared, someone has not returned it - I don't mind. As time passed, it offended me more and more.

In this book, the wild flowers are described exactly as the couple wander through the Galilee - the way an Israeli nature-lover would describe them. Of course the woman is a nature-lover, as well as being in Flight from a Message - (the Hebrew title).

I once worked with a client like this woman: from a war-torn country, she had somehow been exported here as a refugee, her two daughters remaining behind with her husband and his second wife. She was as they say, 'beside herself' with worry about the girls, spent her days in ceaseless walking over the hills around our town, tortured by terror about their fate, irritable and angry. In this book, Ora feels she has to leave in order to avoid/to prevent the death of her younger son. (My clients' daughters arrived safely after many months of anguish).

I've read several reviews of this book - one by a Patricia somebody, is a litany of complaints because she does not understand the culture in which the author is writing. Indeed for a non-Israeli, some work will be required - but then, Wikipedia is at your fingertips and most of the code words - names of villages, names of people - will be listed. For anyone with an Israeli connection, this book is very clear.

For those who carry Israel in their heart, the book is also painful. For I believe that when he calls it To The End of the Land, the author is showing how this may lead to the end of the dream - can Israel survive these losses?

Despite visiting Israel recently, I find that I now understood Israeli reality differently. For instance, why my brother-in-law was not keen to eat in a restaurant. The atmosphere of fear generated by suicide bombers. The soldiers' pitilessness. The Arabs' hatred. The desperate, frantic way many people live.


Some reviewers say that Ora's life appears overly narrow; I would disagree: this is what happens in moments of crisis - the only people who matter are those to whom you are very close.

Grossman does a wonderful job portraying Ora's feelings, though maybe he does go on for a little too long. The writer Avram comes to life - Ora's husband Ilan less so. There are moments which remain in the mind - the four-year old who learns about meat, the Palestinians in the school at night, and the scenes on the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War. I admire the way he unwraps the story little by little, giving hints and clues and allowing links to emerge gradually, as in real life. It is satisfying to experience.

I think that this book will endure and gain weight, as time goes on and its prophetic voice emerges more strongly.

David Grossman speaks about this book here.