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Imre Kertész was one of the first authors I reviewed on this blog. His the other books in his tetralogy (Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and Liquidation) are brilliant. (For some reason Melville House doesn’t consider Liquidation a part of this sequence, so they call it a trilogy.) I couldn’t wait to get the missing piece — trilogy or tetralogy — Fiasco (A kudarc, 1988; tr. from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, 2011). I was thrilled when I found out Melville House was publishing it. I must not have been the only one waiting because the back of this book, where a little synopsis would appear, it simply says, “Finally: the heretofore untranslated ’missing’ book from the trilogy that won Imre Kertész the Nobel Prize.”
Review copy courtesy of Melville House.
Despite the lack of synopsis, it is no secret what this book is about. Kertész, a survivor of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, who when released quickly found himself in another totalitarian regime that was Communist Hungary, doesn’t write about anything else.
So why read more Kertész if you’ve read one? Because Kertész’s writing expresses many things besides the horror of the Holocaust (though never does it forget the horror of the Holocaust). For one, his characters often remark on the irrationality of their existence — no, the arbitrariness under which he suffered, the absurdity of life. I believe this passage from Fiasco gives a great sense. This is Kertész writing as Kertész:
Well then, at the time I came into the world the Sun was standing in the greatest economic crisis the world had ever known; from the Empire State Building to the Turulhawk statues on the former Franz Josef Bridge, people were diving headlong from every prominence on the face of the earth into water, chasm, onto paving stone — wherever they could; a party leader by the name of Adolf Hitler looked exceedingly inimically upon me from amidst the pages of his book Mein Kampf; the first of Hungary’s Jewish laws, the so-called Numerus Clausus, stood at its culmination before its place was taken by the remainder. Every earthly sign (I have no idea about the heavenly ones) attested to the superfluousness — indeed, the irrationality — of my birth.
Kaddish for an Unborn Child and Liquidation are the two books that most accutely express this idea, which rings as a type of philosophy. In one, a man rages and mourns a child he doesn’t have because he couldn’t bear to see one born; in the other, a man doesn’t commit suicide because it would be redundant. They’re devastating books, but the intelligence behind them, which is surprisingly touched with compassion, makes them sublime.
Another reason for reading anything you can by Kertész is that the books are always unique in structure. Fatelessness seems the most conventional, but Kaddish for an Unborn Child is essentially one long sentence (that works) and Liquidation is begins with a play the main character wrote that tells the details of his death — it even gets his friends’ reactions right, word-for-word.
Fiasco is also unique. We begin here:
The old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet. He was thinking. It was midmorning. (Relatively — getting on for ten). Around this time the old boy was always in the habit of having a think.
He had plenty of troubles and woes, so there were things to think about.
But the old boy was not thinking about what he ought to have been thinking about.
The old boy, it turns out, is Kertész (though it is never explicit). There he is, thinking, as is often the case midmorning. (Relatively — getting on for ten). The book begins rather simply. I’d like to draw a comparison, if I could, to the canon form in music. The first line of music is the old boy standing by the filing cabinet. Another note comes in (a few pages later):
“I’m just standing here in front of the filing cabinet and thinking,” the old boy as thinking, “instead of actually doing something.”
Well certainly, the truth is — not to put too fine a point on it — that he should long ago have settled down to writing a book.
For the old boy wrote books.
That was his occupation.
Or rather, to be more precise, things had so transpired that this had become his occupation (seeing as he had no other occupation).
Throughout the first part (the first 115 pages), these phrases will be repeated as others are added, much of what comes building on and incorporating what came before. As the part progresses, it becomes more and more complex, and more and more murky, though relationships between ideas become clearer. It might sound frustrating, but it was very satisfying reading. Kertész may have challenging structures, but I’ve always found his writing (surely, thanks to superb translating from Tim Wilkinson) to flow smoothly. This was no different. It remains clear what is going on, so the effect of the above is not to confuse but to give us a window into the mind of the old boy sitting at the filing cabinet, getting thoroughly worked up about the prospect of writing a book.
The old boy has already written one book, which, at first, was not well received. Take, for example, this letter from a prospective publisher:
We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experience does not come off, while the subject itself is horrific and shocking. His behaviour, his gauche comments . . . annoyed . . . the novel’s ending, since the behaviour the main protagonist has displayed hitherto . . . gives him no ground to dispense moral judgements.
This book the publishers disliked so much is Fatelessness, which does indeed have a narrator with a surprising tone that might come off as cynical and, well, gauche, particularly as he seems to lack the appropriate reverence we as society might deem appropriate given the content.
So, much of part one is the old boy thinking about writing his next book while also remembering the process of writing (and the agony of publishing) his first book. In the filing cabinet are his old papers, which he reads (and which we get nice long passages of). Though he was there, he still gets a shock — practically gasps with surprise — when he reads, ”I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time.” The result of all of this mixing and building is a masterful part one that goes into the process of writing about experience, and about experiencing the Holocaust in particular:
As I was reading this passage, these memories came alive within me, and at the same time I was able to verify that the sentences fitted together in the organic sequence I had envisaged. That was all very well, but why had not what existed before those sentences, the raw event itself, that once-real morning in Auschitz, come to life for me? How could it be that those sentences for me contained merely imaginary events, an imaginary cattle truck, an imaginary Auschwitz, and an imaginary fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy, even though I myself had at one time been that fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy?
He finds it hard to reconcile the art that goes into recreating the experience with the real experience itself. He also speaks about the capacity of a reader to really understand this work of the imagination. To illustrate, he tells the awful story of 340 Jews who were killed.
that these 340 deaths on the rocks, for instance, might rightly find a place among the symbols of the human imagination — but on one condition: only if they had not occurred. Since they did occur, it is hard even to imagine them. Rather than becoming a plaything, the imagination proves to be a heavy and immovable burden, just like those boulders in Mauthausen: people do not want to be crushed under them.
So this is part one, only about a third of the book, and already I’ve exhausted the space I usually take to write a review. What is the second part? Well, the old boy finally settles down to write his next book. And the second part is the book the old boy writes. Like Fatelessness, it features Georg Köves, that fourteen-year-old boy we first met at the railroad tracks at Auschwitz. The war is over, and Georg is no longer in a concentration camp. However, he soon finds himself in Communist Hungary. And he has an urge to write a book about his experiences in the concentration camps.
To be honest, as much as I loved the first part, I only admired the second part. It was long and felt, uncharacteristically of Kertész, long-winded. I wasn’t as enthralled with the ideas or with Köves’s life. That said, when the time comes to reread Kertész, I’ll not hesitate a second to reread this book with his others. It is a great, layered look at the process of writing a book that never lets the reader forget the horrors the book is recounting — indeed, they are emphasized.
Thank you Melville House and Tim Wilkinson for making it finally available in English.
“I would prefer not to.” How long has that phrase haunted me because I didn’t know what it meant to literature! I confess: I had never read Melville’s short masterpiece, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (1853). I’m not sure why not. After all, I’m a fan of American fiction. I’m a fan of Moby-Dick. I know many tastes I admire love this book. I wander around downtown Manhattan, from Wall Street to Trinity Church to City Hall, the book’s haunts, and, indeed, I dabble in the law of stocks and bonds as does the book’s narrator — and not many great works of literature go there. What got me to read it, finally? The desire to be in on the joke! ”I would prefer not to.”
Our narrator is a Wall Street attorney who lacks professional ambition: “I am a man who, from his youth upward, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.” He never argues in court and is very content that his job consists primarily in creating legal documents that help others transfer stocks and bonds. Back then, since all of the documents were written by hand, and there had to be several copies of each document, it is no surprise that his support staff consists of a few scriveners and one courier. Before Bartleby arrives (“who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of”), the staff consists of Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut. With wit and verve, Melville describes each of these employees. Turkey and Nippers are the two scriveners. One is tense and touchy in the morning, the other in the afternoon. They are great side characters who provide a lot of comedy throughout. Here, for example, is a description of Nippers’s attempts to get his desk set to just the right incline:
Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get this table to suit him. He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting paper. But no invention would answer. If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk: — then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered the table to his waistbands, and stopped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back. In short, the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted.
“Nippers knew not what he wanted”: what a great way to get to that insight.
The young courier is Ginger Nut, so-named because most of the time he is sent to fetch these treats for the rest of the staff. Before even getting to know Bartleby, I was enchanted by this book and its strange characters portrayed in such charming language. But then, he approaches: “I can see that figure now — pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby.”
When hired, Bartleby appears to be an ideal worker. He doesn’t have the mood swings that afflict Turkey and Nippers, and, for the most part, he just sits down and works and works — “at first.”
At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.
The narrator’s misgivings are well founded. There’s something odd about Bartleby, some disconnect. He sets up his office space to secure the utmost privacy, though there is nothing he is trying to hide. His interactions with the staff and the narrator are limited to the work at hand. And then, what occurs next comes as a complete shock to the narrator, who is impressed but worried:
In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do — namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singluarly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”
It’s hard to imagine saying that to an employer. Still, Bartleby has said it in such a manner that our narrator cannot help but sit there dumbfounded and mute.
His face was leanly composed; his gray eye dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises.
It only gets worse. “I would prefer not to” becomes Bartleby’s response to every request. The narrator’s mood vascillates between fury and curiosity and pity. Obviously there is something amiss in Bartleby, and the narrator cannot grasp it. And Bartleby would prefer not to get into any specifics.
Despite this book being much much shorter than Moby-Dick, Melville is still able, through his incredible writing, to grasp depths of emotion. The reader feels the complexities of these characters deeply. .
My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion.
As funny and fun as it is to read, Bartleby the Scrivener is not necessarily a happy story. How does one deal with an employee who prefers to do no work and who, eventually, prefers not to leave the premises, even when he is invited to move in with the narrator?
To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul rid of it.
Highly recommended. Get in on the joke, too, and be wowed by the great literature on the side!
Melville House is publishing “The Essential Heinrich Böll” over the next year. This month they have published The Safety Net, Billiards at Half-Past Nine, and The Clown (Ansichten eines Clowns, 1963; tr. from the German by Leila Vennewitz, 2010). In April, we will see The Train Was on Time, Irish Journal, and Group Portrait with Lady; next January they will be bringing out the final two volumes: What’s to Become of the Boy? Or: Something to Do with Books — A Memoir, and The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll.
Review copy courtesy of Melville House.
This was my first experience with Böll. I had no idea whether his prose was dense and daunting, though that was certainly my preconception. I was surprised (and relieved, honestly — I wasn’t in the mood for obfuscation when I opened the book), then, to find the prose smooth and fluid and highly readable. The substance is still layered and folded, making much of this fine reading.
The Clown is Hans Schnier, our narrator:
What I do best are the absurdities of daily life: I observe, add up these observations, increase them to the nth degree and draw the square root from them, but with a different factor from the one I increased them by.
Hans is in his late twenties, and, despite his relatively substantial success for a professional clown, his parents still don’t consider him gainfully employed. When the book begins, Hans narrates his fall from grace; the style of the narration shows very clearly that he is distracted, depressed, and demotivated. Marie, the girl he has been living with “in sin” for several years, has been struck with guilt and has left him to marry a Catholic man in the Catholic church (“I must take the path that I must take.”). Hans comes from a Protestant family, but he has never been religious. Here is a great passage that shows how well Böll packs all of this information into a moody first-person narration:
I am not religious myself, I don’t even go to church, and I make use of the sacred texts and songs for therapeutic purposes: they help me more than anything else to overcome the two afflictions Nature has saddled me with: depression and headaches. Since Marie went over to the Catholics (although Marie is a Catholic herself I feel this phrase is appropriate), the intensity of these two complaints has increased, and even the Tantum Ergoor the Litany of Loreto — till no my favorite remedies for pain — are not much use any more. There is one temporarily effective remedy: alcohol; there could be a permanent cure: Marie. Marie has left me. A clown who takes to drink falls faster than a drunk tile-layer topples off a roof.
Besides suffering from depression, Hans also suffers from an inclination toward monogamy, which he describes as an affliction though something deeply embedded in his nature. Hans is completely lost without Marie; he has never wanted and still does not want anyone else. Not being religious but believing in monogamy, Hans rages that Marie will be committing adultery is she marries someone else, even though her Catholic friends keep insisting that by marrying someone else she will actually become pure. The conflict between unity (as portrayed in this relationship) being torn apart by social mores is central to the novel and was certainly the most interesting aspect for me.
The structure of the novel is interesting. Mostly, we are with Hans for only one day. He has returned to Bonn, his hometown, after his dependence on alcohol made him fall, literally; during a particularly clumsy performance which lacked the subtle movements that made him an artist, he fell, twisted his knew, and didn’t get up. The stage manager cancles all upcoming performances and refuses to pay full price for this one. His agent cannot secure another booking and is, frankly, getting tired of dealing with Hans anyway; where his agent could once book a nightly performance at a substantial price (and a substantial commission), Hans is now threatening to rely on the pennies thrown at him for performing in the street. Through all of this, Hans remains apathetic; performing on the street would, apparently, be just fine. Mainly, he wants more to drink:
I would have given my shirt for a drink, and only the thought of the complicated negotiations involved in such an exchange discouraged me from undertaking this transaction.
So the book picks up in Bonn, after Hans has returned. Through the remainder of the day, Hans makes a series of phone calls to and is visited by some family, friends, and enemies. He doesn’t necessarily want to speak to any of them — unless they can help him speak to Marie; mainly, he hopes some of them will give him a bit of money. His parents, after all, are millionaires.
As these interactions take place, we get a substantial back-story to the relationships and to Hans’ bitterness (it is no surprise to see that Hans has often been compared to Holden Caulfield). For example, we learn that during World War II, when Hans was just barely an adolescent, his mother bought into and supported the new regime and all of the atrocities it committed: “You do see, don’t you, that everyone must do his bit to drive the Jewish Yankees from our sacred German soil.” This ardent national spirit led her to send her older daughter, Henrietta, into service at age seventeen. Henrietta died, and one of Hans’ bitterest memories is of her departure. Now, his mother has a different tone, and Hans derides her as a hypocrite.
Meanwhile for years my mother has been president of the Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences; she goes to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, sometimes even to America, and lectures to American women’s clubs about the remorse of German youth, still in the same gentle, mild voice she probably used when saying goodbye to Henrieta.
When Hans speaks to her on the phone, he lets his hatred show. Here’s what he says when she answers: “‘I am a delegate of the Executive Committee of Jewish Yankees, just passing through — may I please speak to your daughter?’ I even startled myself.” He also startled me.
The personal relationships and the conflicts portrayed are what made this book delightful for me. However, it wasn’t all delight. I’m not versed in the larger social conflicts Böll is addressing here. I’m not familiar with the role of the Catholic church in post-War Germany, and I’m not familiar with the criticisms against it. I also got the distinct impression that this was not speaking about Germany generally but about this particular region of Germany. When Hans goes into the politics and social constructs of this region, I was lost and the book seemed to drag on. Surely it would be more interesting if I were better educated on these matters, but, coming at it as a general reader, these longueurs were difficult to get through.
Thankfully the book is filled with intimate relationships between people, and those I do understand. Böll’s mixture of depression and wit — “There’s nothing more depressing for people than a clown they feel sorry for. It’s like a waiter coming up in a wheelchair to bring you your beer.” — also filled this book with life. Overall, a good read, and I’m anxious to see what the other Essential Bölls are like.
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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