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.

Cheesy

An almost-centenarian of my acquaintance very much enjoyed Mrs Queen Takes the Train, by William Kuhn (Allen & Unwin, 2012). Mr. Kuhn is a journalist and has no fear of cliches. The dialogue is often wooden and one can almost hear him giggle as he writes the predictable repartee between gay characters.

That is the book's main drawback - the way it is written. The story is funny and entertaining, as long as you like reading about royalty and don't expect anyone to behave realistically. I read the edition for sale in Australia, and the jacket is as cheerful as the rest of it. I finished it in one sitting and enjoyed myself. I liked the queen's foray into yoga, a good idea. 

I double-checked and found via the web that Paxton & Whitfield 'since 1797' do exist, and on Jermyn St too. They have a well-developed web-site which makes no mention of this book anywhere - a lack of whimsy on their part. They will benefit enormously from the publicity, even though the cheese in the book is bought for a cheese-loving horse. The horse, after all, has been named Elizabeth and is stabled at the palace.


Oh, and the Duke of Edinburgh has been left out of the story. It is a mystery.

Proust on friendship

Back to Proust. I am reading A La Recherche - about to finish Volume 3, Le Cote de Guermantes.

Joseph Epstein has written a moving review of M. Proust's Library, by Anka Muhlstein, published in the Wall Street Journal. I have not read this book, yet.

There is mention of a 1905 essay by Proust entitled On reading, which I shall try to get hold of . Here is what Ms. Muhlstein says about it, according to Epstein:
 

"...in Proust's freeing himself to write his great novel, he quoted Descartes: "The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most cultivated of men of past centuries who have been their authors." Proust's examination of "the original psychological act called reading," that "noblest of distractions," holds that books are superior to conversation, which "dissipates immediately." A book, he felt, is "a friendship . . . and the fact that it is directed to one who is dead, who is absent, gives it something disinterested, almost moving." Books are actually better than friends, Proust thought, because you turn to them only when you truly desire their company and can ignore them when you wish, neither of which is true of a friend..."

The final paragraph of the review includes the following description of Proust, which corresponds exactly to my own dawning realisation:

"...No other modern author was more alive than he to the toll taken by snobbery, cruelty, brutishness; none so exalted kindness, loftiness of spirit, sweetness of character, the kind and generous heart..."

However clear-sighted he is, and conscious of people's foibles, he is never less than kind and compassionate in his writing about them. Also very funny.

The rest of the review is worth reading too.

Pleasant characters

I re-read Margery Allingham's Coroner's Pidgin (first published by William Heineman in 1945, more recently by Penguin).  It's an Albert Campion 'thriller' - the quotation marks are there because I didn't thrill.  It is a period piece which brings back my teenage years, when I was first allowed to read her books, supposedly for 'grown-ups'. The writing itself is excellent, but the story is twee.

Her story includes a description of war-time London, in ways which can be unexpected: London's "thin, war-time traffic", someone leaning back on the taxi's leather seat, ARP personnel "on duty in the square" keeping pigs there, and calling them 'old girl', a soldier finding himself "living in two worlds which were utterly different" - the civilian and the military, familiar landmarks vanishing - "avenues of neatly tidied nothingness".

Returning the book to the shelf, I found another of her books, Tiger in the Smoke, written in 1952. Again, Albert Campion plays a role, and so does Canon Avril, a wise and kind excentric. There is a cute warning, printed as a small block in italics in the middle of the page preceding the table of contents:

Only the most pleasant characters                                                              in this book are portraits of living                                                                   people and the events here recorded                                                             unfortunately never took place.

The characters' behavioural cliches made me cringe at times, but I remained compulsively involved right  to the end.

'Madam Idiotina of the Highest Order'

Read Vivienne Plumb's The Diary as a Positive in Female Adult Behaviour (1999, Headworx), a small mysterious book.

As well as being mysterious, it is very well written: on p. 10, the story teller - diary writer - sees

"...the Cakeman's bubblegum pink van. It was the pink of sticking plasters or like those baby girl clothes they sell in those baby clothing shops that close down and get turned into burger bars...".

Then she writes:

" The Cakeman was parked opposite the 24-Hour Shop and he was delivering chocolate lamingtons, frosted finger buns, brandy snaps, sticky jam donuts, and thick wedges of oozing custard squares.

The sliding rear doors of the van were open and inside I could see the Cakeman himself, a small man in bermuda shorts with his arms full of apricot pies. I asked him if I could buy a donut and he agreed and invited me into the van.

In the soft cakey dark the Cakeman's long socked leg brushed against mine as he handed me the donut. The jam gleamed evilly from the centre, an evil ruby pirate eye winking and glinting, aye, aye, eat me why don't you, aye, why don't you eat three of me in one go?"

I have noticed that Plumb generally avoids capital letters - she writes 'friday'  - which makes Cakeman's capital C salient. He is delivering unhealthy sickly sweet food from the van's dark hole. Even though he is only 'a small man in bermuda shorts', one feels that he is a being with some awful power, there is a sense of danger when he 'invites her into the van'. Innocence perverted by male power. There is a soft darkness and a long leg brushing against her (Yuk!). The donut gleams evilly - there! now it is said outright, he is evil. He tries to draw her into into an 'in-depth philosophical debate'.

My other favourite bit is at the end of the book, when she reports behaving particularly stupidly under the influence of  sexual desire:

"I am a fool.
I know I am a fool.
I am Madam Idiotina of the Highest Order."

That delighted me, it is the kind of things teenagers say to each other and to themselves. A funny dialogue develops between the different parts of herself - MADAM IDIOTINA and the OTHER PERSONA, GENERALLY IGNORED. I laughed out loud.

A bow to Semadar Megged

The Rabbi's Daughter by Reva Mann (2007)  - an unpleasant read. Too much sex told too vividly: the main character is young and desperate and continuously makes decisions based on a desire to escape from her loneliness, and I found I had little patience for her desperation, though I finished the book to see what happens, because I am a compulsive finisher. The Jewish Orthodox lifestyle rang true as described there. It was interesting to find out what their rules are for sex. Less stringent than I'd heard.

On the other hand, I read Enrique Vila-Matas' Never any End to Paris, which he wrote in Spanish in 2003 and which was translated by Anne McLean in 2011 (New Directions Publishing). It is very well translated, in the sense that it is fluent and one does not feel any obstacle between oneself and the author's thoughts:  the style is limpid. Reading Vila-Matas reminds me of when I first plugged earphones into my ears and listened to someone speaking: the voice seemed to exist in my head as if there was nothing between my ears except the words passing through, like a beam of light in the dark.

I liked the cover and all that it hints at: this is the second time I've come across a cover by Semadar Megged, and I think she does it intelligently; it is a pleasure to wonder about what she has done and why, though the poor translator deserves a bigger font here.

I want to read this book a second time because it is so rich. I want to understand as much as possible what is in there. Vila-Matas mentions Hemingways' iceberg theory of the short story: never tell what is most important. He writes ironically about irony, and my feeling is that Hemingway - who is a major figure in the book - Hemingway took himself immensely seriously.

The book contains other strong presences: the city of Paris, with its cafes and grey streets, Marguerite Duras who lets Vila-Matas live in her garret, his best friend Raul Escari, and all the other famous people who lived in the garret before him.

All of this divided into 113 sections in lengths varying from several pages to short paragraphs. Why 113, I wonder? All I know is that it is a prime number the three cifers of which can be permutated to form two other prime numbers, 131 and 311...

Concerning

From Bodil Malmsten's blog Finistere - translated from Swedish with the help of Google Translate:

Mitt Romney, tax evader, presidential candidate
Vanity Fair August 2012

Sweden is not the United States. This is not America, but still. The money, all Mitt Romney's money, his personal money, private equity, how much money banks and big companies donate to Mitt Romney's campaign; how we think when we think about money, whether we consider the distribution of money, how we think about taxes, how we think about having and not having, how we think about money - this is not about Mitt Romney, the elections in the US - this concerns everyone everywhere, every day.