Click 
John Self posted a review of Europeana (2001; tr. from the Czech by Gerald Turner, 2005) nearly three years ago (here). I immediately went out and got the book, but, as sometimes happens, when it came I put it aside, feeling like it would be a book I’d really enjoy and I might as well save it for one of those moments when I needed to enjoy a book. Well, I have been making my way through some of the Booker Prize longlist (with only a limited degree of joy, sadly), and it finally came time to read the biggest book of the bunch, former Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. Well, I hope to get back to that book and review it here in the next couple of months, but let me just say that after reading that book for a week (and getting not very far), I put it down and picked up Europeana. These books are not really comparable, though both range the twentieth century, but let me just say that I got more enjoyment out of this book’s first sentence than I had gotten at any time during the week with The Stranger’s Child (I intend to go back to that book, and I’m hoping I end up really liking it — sometimes you just need a break when it isn’t working).
Europeana is a relatively short book at around 125 pages, but in those pages it meshes together an abundance of events and themes of the twentieth century, from the wars to the introduction of the Barbie Doll, the whole time poking fun at the retrospectively ignorant 1989 essay by Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History”; Europeana‘s final sentence is this:
But lots of people did not know the theory and continued to make history as if nothing had happened.
This book is largely a swipe at any attempt to explain history or predict what’s coming; the one constant, the one thing we can rely on, is human absurdity, which is nicely introduced in Ouredník’s tone in the book’s first, scientifically quantitave sentence:
The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War who measured 176 centimeters, and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans.
It’s a strange perspective on loss, but my favorite part is that last conclusion – ”and so they were” — which makes fun of the methods and the conclusions we make as we study this stuff and makes us shake our heads as we realize that something as arbitrary as three centimeters can determine how one sits in history. In a way this emphasizes just how mechanical humanity can become when determining how to best mete out destruction — and then respond to it.
There is a lot going on in this book, but a couple of themes burst through the discussion on just about every topic. One is how dissatisfied some were by the past — the inhumanity, the violence, the injustice — and how they wanted to look forward to a better future, made possible by the optimization of the human race, a guarantee of peace and a harmonious society (with convivial entertainment). One of the book’s principal strengths is that it can at once speak of this goal and the horrors people committed trying to realize it: “And in 1914, American psychiatrists urged that alcoholics be promptly sterilized in the interest of preserving a healthy, superior society.” It almost doesn’t need to be said that the book spends a great deal of time discussing the Holocaust (all in that strange tone).
Europeana doesn’t just focus on these blatantly inhumane attempts to optimize humanity. Science promises much. A favorite passage from near the end is the discussion of sperm banks and how a woman could walk in and go through a long list of attributes so they could mix and match to get the perfect offspring. They are even supplied — if they ordered it — with a recording of the dad’s voice:
The text of the recording was HELLO! THIS IS A REALLY LOVELY DAY, JUST MADE FOR WALKING IN THE COUNTRY. I HOPE YOU’LL BE SATISFIED WITH ME. And one woman who ordered the recording wanted to know if she could have a ten-percent discount because the sperm donor had a lisp.
So this particular “dad” might not bring about optimized offspring, but perhaps the price is right — the sentiment itself doesn’t speak well for our progress.
Contrary to those who believe in the optimization of humanity, there are those who believe the past was wonderful, and certainly the twentieth century — with the inhumanity, the violence, the injustice — was a sure sign that the end of the world was nigh. Here’s a wonderful passage that expresses a bit of this sentiment:
In the Golden Age people were more courteous to each other and criminals were more considerate and did not fire at policemen, and young people treated each other with respect and restraint and did not have sexual intercourse until they were married, and when some young man raped a girl in the fields on her way home from work and she then became pregnant, she would put the child in an orphanage where it was cared for at the state’s expense, and when some motorist ran over a chicken, he would get out of his car and pay for the chicken.
I love how this short passage contains, in one line, one of the book’s many deliberate (though always presented in a tone that makes it look blind) contradictions: “young people treated each other with respect and restraint and did not have sexual intercourse until they were married, and when some young man raped a girl in the fields . . .”
Ouredník is not just making fun of the way we view history; he’s also making fun of the way we study it, the way we manipulate it. Here is another, perhaps better, example of how he does this. This passage comes from early in the book:
News came from the military headquarters that the was was nearing its end and melancholy was to be avoided, spirits were to be kept up and patience and a positive attitude were required, and in 1917 an Italian soldier wrote in a letter to his sister I FEEL THAT EVERYTHING THAT WAS GOOD WITHIN ME IS GRADUALLY LEAVING ME AND I FEEL MORE AND MORE CERTAIN EVERY DAY.
And quite a bit later, with no reference back to the original quote, we have this passage:
And one of the commune’s members became a well-known choreographer in Nazi Germany and devised gestural dance for the German workers in order to increase productivity in the arms factories. And in 1917, an Italian soldier wrote in a letter to his sister I FEEL MORE AND MORE POSITIVE EVERY DAY. And in 1930, a French doctor announced the beginning of a new age that would transpire under the sign of Aquarius, which would give birth to a new human being and usher in a world without war and violence.
Besides showing human ignorance with these types of contradictions (this latter one a good example of stripping out context to further one’s point), Europeana also has a load of marginalia, as if we are reading a textbook and some student has gone through it to prepare for a test. Nearly every page has one or two passages written to the side, meant to highlight what is being said, though these passages are often ridiculous because the marginalia leaves out pieces of information, highlights the insignificant portion, completely changes the meaning of the passage, or is just ridiculously pointless (e.g., the marginalia next to the passage on the sperm donor’s voice I pulled above simply said “Country Walks”).
I really enjoyed this book. It was humorous and serious and very skillfully written (and translated — Turner won the 2004 PEN Translation Award for this), and it provides a nice bit of perspective on just how warped our perspectives can be.
To my knowledge, the only Czech literature I’ve read is from that fairly famous author who has his own adjective. It was to expand my range, more than anything then, that led me to open Michal Ajvaz’s The Other City (Druhé mesto, 1993; tr. by Gerald Turner 2009), lauded as a hymn to Prague, a city I’ve never been to but hope to visit. Of course, the intimations of eccentric imagery and the connection to Borges also interested me. Oh, and everything the Dalkey Archive puts out is at least worth looking into.
Review copy courtesy of The Dalkey Archive Press.
The book started clearly and methodically enough with a nice scene where the narrator is reading a book on a snowy Prague day. It spoke nicely to my mood.
I was in no hurry; I was happy to be in a room that smelled pleasantly of old books, where it was warm and quiet, where the pages rustled as they were turned, as if the books were sighing in their sleep.
This peaceful beginning, while somewhat indicative of the nice imagery to come, is completely misleading in other respects. This is perhaps the only peaceful part of the book. Soon we are taken for a ride, getting whiplash, as Ajvaz pulls us from one scene to the next, each getting increasingly bizarre. It all starts when the narrator finds a book with a purple binding and a strange unearthly alphabet. It emits a sort of glow and he starts getting glimpses of another world just out of his periphery.
It was not the first such encounter in my life. Like everyone, I had, on many previous occasions, ignored a half-open door leading elsewhere — in the chilly passages of strange houses, in backyards, on the outskirts of towns. The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn’t run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it. We are walking all the time along a shore and along the edge of a virgin forest. Our gestures would seem to rise out of an entity that also encompasses these concealed spaces, and in an odd way they reveal their shadowy existence, although we are unaware of the roar of waves and shrieks of animals — the disquieting accompaniment to our words (and possibly their secret birthplace); we are unaware of the glitter of jewels in the unknown world of nooks and crannies; usually we don’t stray off the path even once in the course of our lives. What golden temples in the jungle might we find our way to? With what beasts and monsters might we contend and on what islands might we forget our plans and ambitions? Maybe it was the fascinating flurry of snowy chimeras outside the window or maybe an ironic love of fate, engendered by my failures of recent years, that caused my old fear of crossing frontiers to protest only feebly — as if out of habit — and then quickly fall silent; I pulled the book out and opened it once more.
As the narrator goes about his business, thinking about the book, other people begin to admit they’ve encountered the strange letters and have felt the presence of, or even seen, another world that coexists with Prague (perhaps it was my uninitiated senses, but this book didn’t seem to hinge on knowledge of Prague at all; seemed more incidental, but I’d love the insights of others). A particularly affecting account came from an old man whose daughter was taken away by the strange citizens of the other world.
We’ve never met our daughter since, except for a few occasions when we’ve caught sight of her face in the depth of a mirror or in a darkened room, and sometimes we’ve caught the sound of her voice in the roaring of a stove. At first we would occasionally come across slips of paper at the bottom of drawers or between the pages of books, bearing sad messages that we would understand less and less: she would write about halls through which there flowed rivers with rafts carrying bronze lions, and also about never-ending symposia in fossilized forests, or about cafés, where the waiter would emerge out of thick mist.
These accounts get stranger, and finally the narrator himself has a more substantial encounter with the other city when a tiny rusted hatch opened up to a massive cathedral where a priest was leading a congregation. This other city comes to be an obsession for the narrator because he’s sure knowledge of it will lead somewhere. He’s at the time of his life when he no longer wants to ignore the glimpses. In Prague, ”the flame of meaning had gone out,” but in this other perhaps it could be kindled. Thus begins a quest for meaning among absurdities and contradictions.
For the first quarter of the book I must say that the only thing keeping me going was the fantastic though bizarre imagery. It was too disconnected and episodic and didn’t seem to be leading anywhere. In other words, bizarreness for the sake of being bizarre, and I’m not a fan of that. Thanks to the imagery, though, I kept going and the quest for meaning took me in. The episodes, while still strange in unexpected ways, began to cohere also, and I found the theme of clarity and sight to mesh well with the theme of questing and meaning.
One of my favorite passages comes in the latter part of the book. The narrator, still searching for the center, enters a library. Deeper in the library, the stacks of books transform slowly into a jungle. It’s a fantastic scene, but I also enjoyed its introduction where a library patron requests a book from the deep. The librarian about to search for the book accepts his quest.
He is warned by his colleagues not to go there but he just laughs and says he’s worked in the library for thirty years and knows every nook and cranny. When he takes no heed of the warnings, the other librarians rush off to find the reader and beg him to cancel his request, bringing him teetering stacks of magnificent books, books with flashing jewels embedded in the binding and pages scented with the rarest perfumes of the Orient, books with three-dimensional illustrations, full of soft velvets and find sand, books with edible pages tasting of lotus leaves, which the reader may immediately devour after reading, silken books that can be unfolded and used either as a hammock or on windy days as a hovercraft with which to float high above the landscape, books with intoxicatingly erotic stories played out on nocturnal marble terraces beneath cypress trees by the sea: the pages of these books have been soaked with hashish so that after a while anyone reading the book is gripped by a hallucinatory vision and becomes part of the story, bathing with beautiful girls in the warm nocturnal sea, but the stubborn reader casts not one glance at the books they have brought and insists on his book—a book about car maintenance or making pickles — he wants it because he requested it and believes it to be the duty of the library staff to obtain it for him willy nilly, and to the unfortunate librarian’s beautiful daughter whom someone has meanwhile summoned by telephone and who is offering the reader, like Sheherezade, to tell him stories all night long, he merely declares: ‘Look here, young lady, there is nothing for us to discuss, I want my book on car maintenance (making pickles)’ — and so the librarian embraces his daughter and sets off into the depths of the library, everyone gazing stupefied at his departing figure; at the bend in the corridor he turns and waves before disappearing behind the shelves and no one sets eyes on him again; the reader waits in vain for his book, pangs of conscience start to gnaw at him, every hour he goes to ask whether the librarian has returned with his book and he ends up spending the entire day by the book delivery hatch and by five in the morning is marking time outside the locked doors of the Clementium intoning dismal dirges. Several librarians disappear in the depths of the library every year and the librarianship schools are unable to turn out enough graduates.
Surely you get a sense for how wonderfully strange this book is. And thankfully, though we also quest with the narrator for meaning, the book itself is not without purpose, and the meaning comes along.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started the very short Splendide-Hôtel 
Review copy courtesy of The Dalkey Archive Press.
When I receive books I like to open them to peruse their structure. Is it divided into parts, books, chapters (long or short)? Are there several pages of unbroken text? The like. I was surprised when I opened this book to find several short segments all beginning with a letter of the alphabet. Turns out the book is a bunch (27 to be exact) of incredibly short, uhm, musings?, beginning with the letter A all the way through Z, the extra letter being the Rx pharmacy symbol thrown in for good measure. And, to introduce you to the loose feel of the book, here is what Sorrentino said, “One must find some structure, even if it be this haphazard one of the alphabet.” Each letter is important to the segment as that letter inspires a starting point. A, for example, brings out a discussion on flies. I never even noticed—doubt I would have noticed—that an A looks kind of like a fly from above, wings pulled up on the side. As you can tell, even that bit of structure is loose. I can take a strange structure as long as the content provides a reason for it. Here, the content is just as strange and seemingly arbitrary as the structure, so there’s reason enough. And there’s reason for the strange content too.
The title of the book comes from Arthur Rimbaud’s prose poem “Après le Déluge” in his Illuminations: ”Et le Splendide-Hôtel fut bâti dans le chaos de glaces et de nuit du pôle.” (“And Hotel Splendid was built in the chaos of ice and of the polar night.”) For Sorrentino, Splendide-Hôtel is a place of and for the imagination. Within its structure dwell many poetic characters, but the structure is also a place where the work of art is praised for itself, for the toil of its creation and for its grandeur.
Everyone who is a devotee to graciousness in living knows under what incredibly difficult conditions the Splendide-Hôtel was built: the chaos of ice and polar night, the blizzards and avalanches, the black bitter frosts that took so many workers’ lives. Why it was built in such an unprepossessing spot remains a mystery to this day, yet its location has certainly not prevented it from being one of the most elegant hotels to be found anywhere. From the day it was opened in 1872 until the present, it has stood as the epitome of Old World charm.
The primary presences in the novel, besides Sorrentino himself, are the poets William Carlos Williams and Arthur Rimbaud. In many of the segments Sorrentino engages with their work on a formal and substantive level. I believe some familiarity with Williams and Rimbaud is important, but I don’t think it is necessary to enjoy this short book. In fact, this short book might be a good segue into their work. More than analyze their work, Sorrentino uses it to draw out more general meditations on writing, politics, whatever, while keeping the beauty or power of language front and center. Here’s one I particularly liked. It’s how the letter E begins:
It is my opinion as well as that of others that the word grey spelled with an e is “greyer” than the same word spelled with an a: gray.
Can the poet be correct in assigning the color white to this letter? Admitting, therefore, more light to the world so that it becomes itself lighter, creamier, if you will: on the other side of darkness. The blackness of a. Gray holds to itself more black than does grey.
Yes, it is loose. Somehow, though, Sorrentino brings many of the images together in later segments, each building somewhat on what has come before, creating, in a manner of speaking, Splendide-Hôtel, even while discussing it.
While most of the writing is pensive or expository in nature, there are several segments where, though still ruminating about the power of prose, the reader gets a glimpse of feeling that might be more common in Sorrentino’s novels.
I learned to play chess—or play at chess as the expression goes—from a man in my company in the army. Of the many things I remember about him two come to mind immediately each time I think of him: his love for avocados and his showering in a Mexican bordertown brothel with five whores. I see him there, streaming with soapsuds and water in the whirling steam, he and the girls laughing with enormous joy. He was, I believe, a regional chess champion in his native Pennsylvania.
It would be an enormous pleasure to me if he would read this book—finding it on his own—and recognize himself in it. To open it in his easy chair, his four or five children involved in their various activities, his wife preparing supper. He sits back and takes a swallow of cold beer and suddenly—suddenly he tastes that ripe avocado, lightly salted and tangy with a squeeze of lime and smells the clean flesh of those harsh Mexican whores, sees their white teeth and golden crucifixes. He puts the book down to look across the room at his wife. the aroma of meat loaf in the oven, apple pie with plenty of cinnamon.
Outside, the streets and lawns of Allentown are white with the last snowfall of winter, it comes down with that fabled gentleness all writers at some time remark upon in one way or another. And why not?
This passage shows all the evidence I need of his greatness. The contrast between the whore’s flesh and their golden crucifixes, the exotic avocado and the good old American apple pie . . . I wonder, did this fellow ever find himself in the book?
When I began this book I was not looking for a sort of treatise. The talk about Sorrentino I’ve been privy to was all about his devestating novels (which must be somewhat in the cutting tone of the above quote). It was with some trepidation then that I began with the letter A, that fly. Soon I was engaged and it then took me only an hour or two to read straight through. A small cost in time, but it lead me to think about many things, literary, political, personal, etc. Not a bad result when commencing a relationship with an author.
Another of the best places to go for excellent world literature is the Dalkey Archive Press, a nonprofit publisher ran from the University of Illinois. An interviewer once asked the founder, John O’Brien, for a description of the types of books the Dalkey Archive publishes—experimental, avant-garde, innovative? O’Brien said: Subversive. “My point was that the books, in some way or another, upset the apple cart, that they work against what is expected, that they in some way challenge received notions, whether those are literary, social or political.” The Dalkey Archive is also home of the triquarterly publication Context, which you can read on their website. It’s a valuable website for many reasons, but critical introductions to unknown authors (for example, Gérard Gavarry) make it invaluable.
Gavarry is entirely new to me, which makes sense since Hoppla! 1 2 3 (Hop lá! un duex trois, 2001; tr. from the French by Jane Kuntz, 2009) is the first English translation of one of his eight books. It will be available early June. It is the first book this year that when I finished I wanted to go immediately back to page one to read again, even without a short break. It is that interesting and complex. I’m really hoping some of you get a hold of the book so we can talk here about it. It is one to read, reread, and then discuss.
Review copy courtesy of The Dalkey Archive Press.
The title of the book comes from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera: ”And as the first head rolls I’ll say: hoppla!” One can infer from this that things in this book lead up to an act of violence, and that is correct (though it is brief and usually occurs offstage). The 1 2 3, comes because, in a sort of triptych, we get to read the story—the lead-up and the violence—three times with three different sets of images, and to see the roots of violence as they begin to grow in three different perspectives.
The first section, called “The Coconut Palm,” begins with a beautifully rendered traffic jam. Yes, “beautifully rendered” and “traffic jam.” The radio is playing and tells the listening drivers about alternate routes:
This resulted in an anarchic swarm of automobiles filling up the entire local grid. Migratory flows intermixed, intertwined, increased, and multiplied, becoming long processions, wandering in slow motion, searching in the dusk for some alternate route. A cold rain began to fall, soaking the gray of the sky, the red of the brake lights, the white, yellow, and orange of headlights and suburban glare.
“The Coconut Palm” presents the roots of violence from a social or communal perspective. We watch the story unfold almost as if we were one of the many people wandering around the periphery; or rather, as if we are all of the people wandering around the periphery. There is an exceptional scene on a train heading from Paris to the suburbs. The passengers in the last coach are comfortably seated for their journey home until four rowdy youths enter.
At present, the other passengers are taking up less room in the compartment. They are also less individualized, bound together now by the fearful hostility they feel toward these unruly youths they’re being forced to ride with, having no idea what lunatic idea might now come into their heads, what new stunt they might improvise, whether their next move will be swift, precise, and brutal, or slow, expansive, and awkward . . .
The situation worsens when two young women engage in a scuffle with the boys. Nevertheless, the fellow passengers on the train remain uncomfortably immobile. Gavarry describes this scene in a strange and wonderful way that so effectively defamiliarizes the reader with the situation:
All around, some of the passengers wagged their heads, a sickly smile on their faces—which was their way of maintaining that all this commotion wasn’t really amounting to anything nasty. Others, as though barely restraining themselves from intervening, gave a slight wiggle of heroic indignation; while still others acted as though they hadn’t seen a thing, despite the mounting evidence that something disastrous was about to happen right under their noses. Because, despite multiple attempts by the as-yet-unmolested girl to intercede—”Come on, quit screwing around!,” “Cut the crap!,” or “Is this what you guys are like?”—the male excitement was growing. Worse, it was changing form. The four late adolescents, who together had foisted their physicality onto the scene in the train-car from the start, and whose subsequent movements, however varied they may have been from one boy to the next, had nonetheless composed a well-regulated choreography—these same four were not getting increasingly agitated, and each in his own way.
While Gavarry’s premise for the book is excellent, it is bolstered by an exquisite style that can be both abstract in an almost scientific sense, as in this example—
Between the epigastrium and the pelvic region, in among the meanderings of our entrails, there germinates Refusal. We don’t feel its corpuscular presence at first: only a thermal shift, and icy cold welling up from a place deep within us—deep, but nonetheless as far from the self as possible—and which, spreading unobstructed into our bodies, assumes the form of a thousand filaments merging with the complex network of our nerves. This intermingling disrupts the entire organism, all the way to the epidermal level, where, reacting to a phenomenon normally restricted to the viscera, the skin pales here, flashes there, and everywhere starts to crawl. Finally, when it outgrows the belly—as do pain or rage in similar circumstances—Refusal is externalized.
—or disturbingly, poetically, intimate, delving into lonely fears while remaining beautiful, as in this example—
As four hours Universal Time approaches, which in February is three o’clock Ris time, no harbinger of a new dawn emerges, but instead there is a deepening of night in the outlying suburbs. Not a sound to be heard. Nothing stirring. The nocturnal fog soaks the suburban lamplight, so that everywhere the same stagnant icy gray medium reigns, where earth and sky mingle, engulfing structures, sleepers, and vegetation alike.
There is a lot to think about in this piece. I didn’t even go into the fantastic groups of images Gavarry utilizes in each of the three pieces, giving each piece its coherence and completeness while further defamiliarizing the reader, eliminating bearings the reader used to orient him or herself in the other sections. Each section carries the same people to the same event. Each is still unique and compelling and important. Indeed, through this book not only does Gavarry reveal some excellent insights into the roots of violence but, in doing so, he shows the power and vitality of literature.
Recent Comments