Click 
Gail Hareven wrote one of the more intriguing pieces of short fiction published in The New Yorker last year: “The Slows.” Despite that, I didn’t rush into reading The Confessions of Noa Weber (She’ahava Nafshi, 2000; tr. from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu, 2009). However, when the book won Three Percents Best Translated Fiction Award I knew I’d be missing something if I didn’t read it. I have faith in the good opinion of that judging panel.
Review copy courtesy of Melville House.
Like her short story, the book started out fresh:
The city of J lies at the top of the hills of J. That’s how I’d like to begin my story; at a calm distance, with a deep breath, in a panoramic shot focusing very slowly on a single street, and very slowly on a single house, “this is the house where I was born.” But you’d be making a fool of yourself if your J were Jerusalem, since every idiot knows about Jerusalem. And altogether it’s impossible to talk about Jerusalem any more. Impossible, that is to say, without “winding alleys” and “stone courtyards,” “caper bushes” and “Arab women in the market place.” And I have nothing to say about caper bushes and stone courtyards, nor do I have the faintest desire to flavor my story with the colorful patois of colorful Jerusalem characters, twirling their mustaches as they spin Oriental tales.
Noa Weber is a 47 year-old woman. She has single-handedly raised a successful daughter, Hagar, who is now 29. After years of activism, particularly for women, Noa has become a writer of detective fiction. Her central character is Nira Woolf, a strong female lead who finds no need to attach herself to a man. Noa might like to think she’s like her protagonist, but for the last thirty years she has been consumed by her love for Alek, the father of her child, her nominal husband. Perhaps finally feeling empowered by her female protagonist (“Your heart aches because of some man?” she would say. “Nonsense, darling, just hypochondria, a little twinge you’ve decided to blow up out of all proportion. But never mind, sweetie, if you want to feel sorry for yourself, you go right ahead. And I hope you never know what real pain feels like.”), Noa feels it’s time to “confess.” In the paragraph above, which is the book’s first, Noa gives a bit of context to her confession by taking it out of any preconceived context the reader might have coming in. There is no easy way to situate this story:
Not that I’m complaining, God forbid. The facts of my birth and upbringing have nothing to do with what follows here, and even if they did, you need calm and composure to distance the camra like that; calm and composure and a sense of historical perspective, and as far as my situation is concerned, I clearly suffer from a severe lack of both.
To her, her love just is. People don’t look at the context surrounding Romeo and Juliet — they just fell in love, and their love simply was. “Me and my love for Alek — which against my better judgment I experience as transcendence. Me with my dybbuk — which is the only thing that gives me a sense of space.”
The problem is that Alek has no interest in Noa. He never has. In the early 1970s they met as part of a group of young thinkers, people against the “traditions” of Israel. Alek himself isn’t from Israel and finds sees himself as a bit of a saviour. He roams around Europe looking for causes. In Noa he finds a woman who will have to serve in the military if she isn’t married. So, almost on a dare to see if he’s really serious about his beliefs, Alek says he will marry Noa to keep her from having to serve in the military. Noa knows Alek’s motives, but this is what she wants. Soon Noa is pregnant. Alek has no desire to be a father, though he’s not necessarily brutal about the fact. He says he’ll take her to get an abortion, but when she says no he says that a woman has the right to raise her child. He soon leaves the country. Noa realizes all along that one of the reasons she wants to have her baby is because the baby will be partly Alek. However, this “gasping confession without any perspective” isn’t for her daughter’s benefit.However, this “gasping confession without any perspective” isn’t for her daughter’s benefit.
In the years since Hagar’s birth, Alek turns up now and again, always nice but never allowing anyone to think he feels any differently than before. Noa also feels no differently. She continues to life her life as if he’s watching her and judging her every move.
She recognizes that this might not be that healthy. In the evenings Noa joins the “LAA — Love Addicts Anonymous” forum, though she sits silently as the other women in the world try to conquer their obsessive and hurtful addictions to one man or another. Noa has attempted to find ways to overcome her own desperate, visceral attachment to Alek:
I could have and could have and could have, but the problem of course is that I couldn’t. That is to say that from a chemical point of view there was simply no possibility of my detaching myself from him. Just as there was no possibility for me to change my soul, or to cut myself into pieces. I loved him. In other words, he had infiltrated my very depths and then spread through all my cells, and changed my being until I was no longer mistress of my love. It wasn’t “my” love. It didn’t belong to me, I belonged to it and was ruled by it. Or perhaps I belonged to him and was ruled by him. I don’t know.
It’s that last line that give a glimpse at the novel’s power. We have no reason to doubt Noa loves Alek. We also have no real reason to dislike Alek just because he doesn’t return the feelings. We might want him to accept responsibility and help support the child, but at least he’s been clear from the beginning. Nevertheless, Noa realizes that she has no idea who is controlling her life. Both Alek and Nira are absent presences feeding her thoughts.
In the background is Israel through the 70s and 80s. Sometimes those issues come up in the dialogue, though they are never central to the narrative. Still, the politics of that time pervade the way Noa sees herself, especially since it’s through Alek that she sees herself. I found that aspect very interesting.
Sadly, as much as I admired the book, at about the halfway point my interest began to falter. I started to feel like I was reading the same passages over and over again as Noa attempted to understand her love for Alek and explain the major periods in her life, in whatever order they came up. Passages like the following started to feel like they were placed all over just to be clever and not because they were particularly necessary to moving the narrative or building Noa’s character:
If there was any logic in the world, the radio would bleep every time the word “love” was mentioned. The censors would blacken the television screen and warn that the material in question is not suitable for children, that it is subversive, dangerous. That anyone who seriously succumbs to this madness is definitely not friendly to the environment. But nobody apart from me seems to see things this way.
We don’t really need that at the point it comes in the novel. We know how Noa feels. We’ve experienced her wit and unique perspective. The cleverness and unique voice, then, in the end became annoying to me and the book started to look flabby. The book, then, ended rather flat despite the fact that I continued to admire what Hareven was doing with the whole of the novel. And if we zoom back out to the whole, then, despite some of the flab, it is a magnificent book, a great look at an obsessive love from a political and unique narrator. I’m glad I read it, and if you find the passages above interesting, I think you’ll like it too. I can see why it won the Best Translated Book Award. However, of the four shortlisted titles I’ve now read I would have chosen The Twin, The Walsers, or Ghosts above it.
One of my favorite personal projects has been reading through what is available in English from Nobel Prize laureate Imre Kertész. My wife bought be Detective Story for Christmas, but I saw that Melville House was publishing a newly translated piece for their The Contemporary Art of the Novella series. So, I guess because I like the idea of reading something newly published rather than something a few years old, I put off reading Detective Story to wait for The Union Jack (Az Angol Lobogó, 1991; tr. from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, 2009).
Review copy courtesy of Melville House.
Everything I’ve read from Kertész has been about the Holocaust, to one extent or another (since much of his work is still unavailable in English, though, that’s not necessarily saying much). However, after his tragic youth in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Kertész struggled to find a life in post-war Hungary and Communist rule. When reading his later works one can see the influence of this period on his narrative, but it is in The Union Jack that I’ve first seen those formative years described, albeit in a very strange fashion. Here is how the book begins:
If I may perchance wish now, after all, to tell the story of the Union Jack, as I was urged to do at a friendly gathering a few days ago — or months — ago, then I would have to mention the piece of reading matter which first inculcated in me — let’s call it a grudging admiration for the Union Jack; I would have to tell about the books I was reading at the time, about my passion for reading, what nourished it, the vagaries of chance on which it hinged, as indeed does everything else in which, with the passage of time, we discern what, whether it be the consequentiality of destiny or the absurdity of destiny, is in any even our destiny; I would have to tell about when that passion started, and whither it propelled me in the end; in short, I would have to tell almost my entire life story.
Kertész’s style in this piece is very roundabout, much more in the vein of Kaddish for an Unborn Child than, say, Fatelessness — you can see that easily in this first, fairly convoluted, sentence where we learn that he has a story about the Union Jack. It turns out that in 1956, in the midst of those struggling post-war years, Kertész spotted the Union Jack on a jeep. However, we only hear his account of this sighting a couple of pages before the book ends. The rest of it, which does not tell his whole life story actually, is focused on a few recollected experiences centered around reading and becoming aware of Wagner’s Die Walküre all told with a heightened awareness of how intervening years have changed him.
The young man (he would have been about twenty) who, through a sensory delusion to which we are all prey, I then considered was, and sensed to be, the most personal part of myself, I see today as in a film; and one thing that very likely disposes me to this is that he himself — or I myself — somehow also saw himself (myself) as in a film. This, moreover, is undoubtedly what renders tellable a story that otherwise, like every story, is untellable, or rather not a story at all, and which, were I to tell it in that manner anyway, would probably driver me to tell precisely the opposite of what I ought to tell.
This is an impossible book to summarize, but again it showcases one of the most intriguing aspects of Kertész’s writing: the constant awareness of the arbitrariness of history, a theme I’ve been happy to find in my favorite Roth novels. As in Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidation, and particularly Fatelessness, though Kertész is recounting history, there is a constant awareness of dumb luck.
I had become acquainted with my wife-to-be in the late summer the year before, just after she had got out of the internment camp where she had been imprisoned for a year for the usual reasons — that is to say, no reason at all.
It’s a wonderful reflective piece, complex and rewarding, but I’m not sure how much I would have liked it were I not already interested in Kertész. I like to hope I would have, but I’m not sure I would have followed it well. Still, I do know I didn’t like this one as much as The Pathseeker, Kertész’s other book in Melville House’s series, but that one is a masterpiece.
These little novellas, brought to us by Melville House, feel so nice in the hand, and it’s so fulfilling to read a good book in a sitting, that I’m hoping to keep expanding my collection and reviewing the classic and new works here. In their latest batch of classic novellas, Melville House offered a Henry James book I’d never heard of: The Coxon Fund(1894). You may remember from my previous post on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw that I am not well versed in James, but I thought I’d heard of most of his work here or there. Turns out I’m not the only one to find The Coxon Funda new discovery; a few of my friends, who also thought they were moderately familiar with James’s work, looked at me quizzically when I showed them the book.
Review copy courtesy of Melville House.
On a first read, I can understand why The Coxon Fund is not as famous as Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, or The Aspern Papers. This story, still psychologically acute and full of beautiful sentences, lacks some of the drama found in the more famous works. At least, that’s true on the surface. While I was in law school, I always wanted to dig a bit deeper into the cases, particularly the areas of family, trusts, and estates. It’s amazing to see what money and inheritance can do to people, but we were often given only a dry version of the facts post-decline. I am always on the lookout for a book that explores this area better, and I never knew Henry James offered one. The Coxon Fund, as its title suggests, has at its center an endowment that will become the subject of a few disputes, wrecking the potentiality of one family while showing fault lines in others.
Here we have a nameless narrator who is only tangentially involved in any of the main events in the novella. However, he knows all of the primary actors, and his interactions reminded me somewhat of Nick Carraway’s. At the beginning of the story, he tells us he’s just left the Mulvilles. They have recently began boarding Mr. Saltram, a remarkably talented artist who nevertheless is broke and estranged from his wife, “a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproachable and insufferable person.” On the one hand, our narrator is awed by Mr. Saltram, amazed by his intelligence and articulate manner. But Mr. Saltram is not really sophisticated. He fails to show up to his scheduled lectures, or perhaps worse shows up to lecture drunk. Our narrator, while attracted to Saltram, is also aware that Saltram takes advantage: “remarkable men find remarkable conveniences.”
One of our narrator’s friends is Mr. Gravener. Gravener doesn’t accept Saltram — “there was no cad like your cultivated cad.” In fact, Gravener finds Saltram so unimportant that Gravener fails to understand the man’s pull on other people. One of the individuals is Miss Ruth Anvoy, an American who’s come to visit her aunt in Britain. We first meet Miss Anvoy when she attends one of Saltram’s lectures — one Saltram failed to attend. Our narrator tells her she must come again; Saltram is worth it. But our narrator also tells her that Saltram is far from perfect.
A few years pass, and Gravener and Miss Anvoy are engaged to be married. There are some deaths and failed aspirations. Through Gravener we become aware that Miss Anvoy’s aunt has a sum of money she wishes to put to good use:
“She wishes to endow — ?”
“Some earnest and ‘loyal’ seeker,” Gravener said. “It was a sketchy design of her late husband’s, and he handed it on to her; setting apart in his will a sum of money of which she was to enjoy the interest for life, but of which, should she eventually see her opportunity — the matter was left largely to her discretion — she would best honour his memory by determining the exemplary public use. This sum of money, no less than thirteen thousand pounds, was to be called the Coxon Fund; and poor Sir Gregory evidently proposed to himself that the Coxon Fund should cover his name with glory — be universally desired and admired. He left his wife a full declaration of his views, so far at least as that term may be applied to views vitiated by a vagueness really infantine. A little learning’s a dangerous thing, and a good citizen who happens to have been an ass is worse for a community than bad sewerage. He’s worst of all when he’s dead, because then he can’t be stopped. However, such as they were, the poor man’s aspirations are now in his wife’s bosom, or fermenting rather in her foolish brain: it lies to her to carry them out. But of course she must first catch her hare.”
Lady Coxon gives the money to Miss Anvoy to dispose of how she sees fit. Miss Anvoy feels the moral obligation to use the money to support someone who can help the world: “He was like a jelly minus its mould, he had to be embanked; and that was precisely the source of her interest in him and the ground of her project.” Not an idealist, Mr. Gravener disagrees.
Typical of Henry James, what I’ve told you above merely gives structure to a deeper inquiry into the human psyche. All of the characters are greatly realized and offer much to think about. I was only partially disappointed that James left so much for me to figure out on my own (just like those old legal decisions!). An interesting strain of inquiry — the one Melville House focuses on in its book blurb — is that of the artist’s role in the world. Can the artistic abilities of the crass Saltram really make things better? And what do the rest of us do to support such a person? There is plenty of food for thought. Though there were parts, even in this novella, where I became easily distracted by what was going on around me, in the end it had my complete attention — and I have continued thinking about it ever since.
Some books I expect to enjoy merely because I consider them classic in terms of being influential or historical, not because I expect them to have a pleasing aesthetic or narrative. I read them because they appeal to my sense of completeness or because you want to see what people were reading two- or three-hundred years ago. To take a quotation from this very book, I sometimes assume these old novels are ”classics” because when first published they “surprised [readers] as a novelty, and retained the credit by consent which it received by accident at first.”
It was with these limited expectations that I sat down to read one of Melville House’s most recent additions to their Art of the Novella series: the great dictionary writer Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759). The influential tale is 250 years old this year, and I thought reading it would give some pleasing historical context. After the first few chapters I realized once again that books are usually classics because they have pleased readers and not just historians through the years. Here, as is often the case, the historical context is interesting but incidental to the well written words which should make many writers envious.
Review copy courtesy of Melville House.
To call this a novella might be a stretch, depending on how you define the term. Though it is basically the same length as a novella (this edition runs in at just over 180 pages, but there are many blank pages), it is not necessarily the type of narrative one expects when picking up a novella. I consider it to be a philosophical treatise built around episodes but in novella form. That shouldn’t scare anyone off, though. The topic is one we can all relate to: happiness. But just a minute. Before scoffing at Johnson’s chosen subject you should know that this is nothing — nothing – like those books of aphorisms you find today that guarantee to change your life. Johnson is never trying to show the reader how to attain happiness. Rather, he is fixated on the elusive nature of happiness. Can it ever be achieved? The first sentence might clue the reader in on Johnson’s resolution:
Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.
Rasselas is a young prince, twenty-six when the story begins, who lives in a paradisiacal valley created for him and his siblings. There “[a]ll the diversities of the world were brought together, the blessings of nature were collected, and its evils extracted and excluded.” Johnson’s descriptions are beautiful and exotic and impossible but oh so appealing. The Happy Valley is a mythical place even for those who live in the kingdom:
All the artificers of pleasure were called to gladden the festivity; the musicians exerted the power of harmony, and the dancers showed their activity before the princes, in hopes that they should pass their lives in blissful captivity, to which those only were admitted whose performance was thought able to add novelty to luxury.
I love those sentences. In them Johnson, with great prose, moves the narrative forward while describing the setting and alluding to his own negative feelings about the Happy Valley as an ideal. Soon Johnson doesn’t hide his hand. That this place is beautiful but dead for humans becomes apparent when Rasselas is introduced. In ruminating about his state of being, Rasselas compares himself to the animals who are happy if they are fed and watered and comfortable — “. . . but when thirst and hunger ceases, I am not at rest.”
Rasselas decides he must escape the valley. Surely the happy state that is missing there can be found on the outside where life is not so artificial. There are several comical chapters about his attempts to escape, my favorite being the artificer who, after months and months of research and work, invents metal wings that do nothing more than sink into the sea. He was not happy. Rasselas’s bad luck changes, though, when he meets Imlac, a philosopher and scholar who was allowed to enter the valley to teach. Imlac, realizing that Rasselas is disillusioned, does not hide the fact that there is not one person invited into the valley who did not yearn to escape and live on the outside again. Rasselas explains to Imlac his desire to escape the valley to find what Choice of Life will make him happy. He knows this Choice is not available in the valley. Not really believing in Rasselas’s quest (“Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.”), Imlac nevertheless agrees to help him escape and to be his companion on the journey. On the night of escape, Rasselas is surprised to find his sister Nekayah following him. She admits she didn’t know where he was going, but, now that she knows, she wants to go too. Together they quest for the state of being that will guarantee happiness.
Obviously the quest is doomed to failure, but the quest itself is what’s important here. Through it Johnson allows his characters to interrogate several types of people – hermits, scholars, couples, kings, etc. One of my favorites was Rasselas and Nekayah’s discussion on the state of marriage:
Marriage is evidently the dictate of Nature; men and women were made to be the companions of each other, and therefore I cannot be persuaded but that marriage is one of the means of happiness.”
“I know not,” said the Princess, “whether marriage be more than one of the innumerable modes of human misery. . . .”
And here’s the best time for me to insert an Annie Hall quote in a review. While it is very different in tone, the futile search, particularly when looking at relationships, reminded me of the part in Annie Hall where Alvie asks a couple on the street why they are happy:
Alvie: Here, you look like a very happy couple. Um, are you?
Young Woman: Yeah.
Alvie: Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?
Young Woman: Uh, I’m very shallow and empty, and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Young Man: And I’m exactly the same way.
One last thing: As much as I enjoyed this book, I must say that the episodic nature can become grating at times. Like Candide, Rasselas has a weak overall narrative structure that serves mainly to allow the characters to have dialogues with people from a variety of backgrounds. But, again like Candide , there is so much there that within each episode one forgets that it is only loosely tied to other episodes by the single philosophical thread. And there are so many wonderful moments of illumination, like when Johnson reduces the glory of the pyramids to this: “I consider this structure as a monument to the insufficiency of human enjoyments.” And there are beautiful moments of melancholy where the loose structure evaporates and the characters become more than vehicles for philosophy, like when Imlac tells the heartbreaking story of the insane astronomer and the characters hope he can “delay the next morning the rising of the sun.”
Kevin Vennemann is a new name for me and indeed for most of the world—he was born only in 1977. Thanks to Melville House’s Contemporary Art of the Novella series, which focuses on publishing the neglected art form, we in the English-speaking world get this strange little book by a very young German author. I was shocked that Melville House would publish the young writer’s Close to Jedenew (Nahe Jedenew, 2008; tr. from the German by Ross Benjamin). Seems like in such a limited publication series they’d want to focus on the novellas of the truly great. I was shocked, that is, until I read the book.
Before I give a brief description of the plot, I want to say that I did not intentionally place this review right after Malamud’s The Fixer, though the unjust treatment of the Jews is again the theme. This one, however, is markedly different. For one thing, Kevin Vennemann, from what I can tell, is not a Jew. Further, it is written by a young German who grew up when memories of the Holocaust are fading though the images remain. Also fading is the guilt. Hence, Vennemann’s novel has been heralded as the first Holocaust novel of a new generation, a generation that need not be concerned that stylistic flare will detract from the theme. While it seems all I’m reading lately is dealing with some matter Jewish, I’m no expert, but the style here is definitely the most important aspect of this book, despite its tragic story. Now, I usually don’t like showy styles. I think too much contemporary literature is actually nothing more than clever sentences stacked against each other. Who can come up with the showiest simile? How about ten of them in a row? Who can do yet another post-linear novel, telling a story that has no need to be anything but linear? And Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew has a style that stands out immediately. The difference is that Vennemann has used the style to get at a story and perspective that could not be told in a simpler way. As a reader, I quickly lost myself in the feel of the novel and was no longer drawn out of the story by striking writing.
The story takes place in 1941 in Eastern Poland, on a farm close to Jedenew. The Russians have recently left, and the Nazis are due to arrive at any time. Anticipating their arrival, local farmers begin a murderous assault on the local Jews who had been their friends for generations. They’d celebrated weddings together, the local farmers bringing most of the celebratory necessities. They’d worked together. One of the leaders of the murderous pack even had helped the children begin building a treehouse. These children are telling this tale. They are hiding in the treehouse. While Vennemann’s story is his own, events like this actually happened in the summer of 1941.
Translator Ross Benjamin has done an exceptional job translating from German what must have been a very difficult book. It’s a difficult book to even pull quotes from. A good way to describe the language is fugal. The following pulled quote may look like I’ve just negligently typed the same line over again (and again), but this is how it is:
We stand leaning against the oven, Marek and Anna stand together leaning against the kitchen door, and we count to one hundred, and we count to one thousand, and we count until Marek cries Now, and starts to run, and so we run behind him, stumble through the garden behind the house and over the ridge behind the house toward the woods, toward the field, and Antonina with little Julia on her arm twists her ankle and falls and remains lying in tears on the path that we cut in the field in May, and lays her head in her arms, as we could see if we’d turn around, but we do not turn around, we keep running, we run into the field and think: She falls, she lays her head in her arms, as we could see if we’d turn around, but we do not turn around, we keep running, we run into the field, we think: She falls, she lays her head in her arms, as we could see if we’d turn around, but we do not turn around, we keep running, we run into the field, we think: We are running without turning around even one more time to Antonina.
The book is also fugal in its dreamlike feel. Emphasizing this, though the book goes back and forth in time, often beginning a sentence in one time and ending it in another, the whole book is told in the present tense. The following quote begins sometime before the local farmers attacked. It ends with the children, dwindling in number, hiding in the treehouse watching the soldiers, who have started arriving.
We climb down, we go into the house and throw our jeackets onto the first chair we come across, and to ensure that the treehouse is finished before winter begins, we arrange during dinner, our faces hot with excitement, to go back into the treehouse the next day, to finish building the treehouse, to put up the roof, to put in the door, the windows, the next day we get up at the crack of dawn and get dressed and wash as quickly as we can, and comb each other’s hair and braid each other’s hair and tie on each other’s headscarves and want to rush outside, outside it’s snowing. We lie on our bellies, scarcely dare to breathe, and lay aside the rusty hammers and nails as quietly as possible, we look across to our house and see that some of the soldiers are gathering before our house to receive before our house the first of the slowly approaching black trucks.
The use of present tense is most striking in sentences where its awkwardness jars the reader. I know I normally don’t like style to jar me out of the text, but it was so effective here, creating a disorientation that makes the book not only post-linear but out of time entirely. Here the book is told simultaneously.
It’s scarcely three months ago that Marek is not yet a doctor. . . .
It’s scarcely a handful of moments ago that we’re still sitting . . . .
The simultaneaity of the book works well with the images. Forever the farmers are friendly neighbors. Forever they are tracking the Jews in the fields. Forever in the background Wasnar and Antonina’s farm burns. Forever the tree house is being built. Forever the nine, seven, two children are hiding in it. The book begins, “We do not breathe.” It ends “I do not breathe.”
So I’ve said a lot about style here, and that’s a good reason to take Venneman seriously. However, an even better reason to take him seriously is that he seems to be aware of the extra-narrative function of his stylistic approach to the Holocaust. He knows that such a stylistic account of the Holocaust was virtually impossible in the last generation of German authors. It is good to note that German authors often tried to annihilate any sense of style from their accounts of the Holocaust for fear of appearing to exploit the event to bring attention to themselves. Vennemann seems to know, in a way only the most mature authors know, how his style affects his substance not just in his own book but in the entire genre. And, in a way only the best of writers can manage, he injects this awareness into his book. A father tells his children a story about how he came to the farm close to Jedenew. The children know it is not true.
That doesn’t bother us. For everything that happens at our home close to Jedenew is a story, we determine and decide, when we consult about how we’re going to deal from now on with the fact that Father’s story is not his at all, that he only pilfers his story from here and there and devises it as his, that we know nothing about his true story, and so also don’t know how he actually in reality comes to be on the farms close to Jedenew, but we decide that this story that he pilfers from here and there and devises as his is now, for our, his story, just as everything around us is only a story that can just as well be an invention as Father’s. That we preserve and keep for ourselves, or forget, or someday pass on, or can only remember for ourselves, once, twice, more often, and then can forget when we want, or must forget when nothing else is possible. But always remember and must remember again one last time when, as we decide, we have no other choice.
Over the summer I read Imre Kertész’s Auschwitz trilogy (tetralogy if you don’t rely on English translations): Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and Liquidation. However, the first Kertész book I bought was The Pathseeker (A nyomkeresö, 1977 ; tr. from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, 2008). For some reason, though, I didn’t pick it up until I was reminded of it by John Self’s list of favorite reads of 2008.
Each thing I’ve read by Kertész has been stylistically different, and fairly brilliant. Fatelessness reproduced Auschwitz from an almost nonchalant point of view which led to incredible insights into Georgie. Kaddish for an Unborn Child was a steady declamation of “No!” to the many questions – including one where his wife asked if he’d like to have a child – asked of this Auschwitz survivor, a steady almost end-stop-less rant. Liquidation goes back and forth in time as B., who was a miracle child born in Auschwitz, commits suicide and happens to write all of the conversations his friends would have after his death. Sure, the theme is similar, and the philosophy introduced in one leads to another, but stylistically it would be difficult to pin them all on one writer.
And now I read this little gem, a masterwork in the poignancy of the unsaid.
He leaned forward, very close to the guest, his eyes burning with a strange light, his voice switching to a whisper. “The possibility, you catch my drift? Nothing else, the mere possibility. And that what happens just once, to just one person, has now transcended the frontiers of the possible, is now a law of reality . . .” He broke off, staring ahead, almost crushed, before again lifting his still slightly troubled eyes to the guest. “I don’t know if you understand what I’m getting at . . .”
And truly, it takes a while to figure out what the main character is getting at. We know he is a commissioner, but we don’t know what he is commissioned to do. He is interrogating someone at the beginning of the novel, someone who feels guilty but who is innocent, but we don’t know what for. He is searching for some location, some place hidden in the landscape, but we don’t know what that location is – or why he is searching for it. The air of mystery extends, apparently, to the commissioner’s own wife:
His wife did not respond. What and how much did she suspect, the husband wondered.
As the commissioner gets closer to his goal, the more uncertain even he is about what he is doing and why. He seems to recognize furtive details he can’t quite get his hands on. As much a journey through the landscape of an out-of-the-way train stop, we get a journey into the commissioner’s psyche as he discloses the nature of his assignment. If this sounds like it should be a work by Kafka, that’s completely understandable. In fact, if we look at Kertész’s ability with style, I’d say in this work he reflects Kafka very well. However, and this is something that amazed me – unlike Kafka’s absurdity, this one is “real.” Not that Kafka’s works aren’t real in their essence, but here is no heightened reality exaggerated for effect. As bizzare as it might sound, as ellusive as the author is being, the exercise in silence and inference creates a very realistic piece.
I have done my best not to disclose what is really going on here, who the commissioner is, and what he is doing. Indeed, this is a work best approached with no knowledge of its contents. Here is passage, however, that discloses little but still exemplifies the way Kertész drops little clues while setting up a haunting atmosphere:
These words suddenly confronted him, then they disappeared again in such a way that he could not tell off the top of his head whether he had read them or heard them. He had read them, of course, but right then it seemed as though he were hearing them as well. He turned to his wife, but she seemed to have noticed nothing; she was sitting calmly in her place amid the doomsday that was pulsing all around her.
And, finally, I find this passage articulates my feelings for The Pathseeker (only I think I’d be a bit more praising).
“Odd,” she said quietly.
“Certainly,” the commissioner smiled. “Obviously odd for some. But it contains a truth that is well worth consideration; you just have to decipher it,” he added.
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