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When discussing Robert Walser, a somber mood seems most appropriate. After all, in 1933, Walser was forcibly confined to a sanatorium, where he spent the next twenty-three years until, on Christmas Day, 1956, he went for a walk and died alone in the snow. Yet when one reads this collection, Berlin Stories (tr. from the German by Susan Bernofsky, 2012), one cannot help but notice the vibrancy, the wonder at life; ”A lager please!” is the simple line with which he begins one story here. It seems impossible to get from such exuberance to that lonely Christmas Day.
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
In the summer of 1905, when he was 27, Robert Walser had just published his first book and decided to move to Berlin to live with his brother, a successful stage-set designer. Berlin Stories is a collection of . . . well, not really “stories” — sketches, ruminations, bursts of thought – about Berlin. The book itself is divided into four sections: ”The City Streets,” “The Theater,” and “Berlin Life” contain pieces written mostly between 1907 and 1911 (the years during which he also wrote and published The Tanners (my review here), The Assistant, and Jakob von Gunten); the final section, “Looking Back,” contains pieces written up to 1917, after he had left Berlin. The pieces are each very short, most only two or three pages, with sentences that run on and on, filled with energy.
It’s primarily in the early pieces that we see such punch and thirst for life. The first piece in the book, written in 1907, is entitled, “Good morning, Giantess!” and here Walser wanders out early, before traffic begins, into the streets of Berlin. Soon the early risers start coming out into the street, and Walser laps in the variety:
You encounter eyes as you walk along like this: girls’ eyes and the eyes of men, mirthless and gay; legs are trotting behind and before you, and you too are legging along as best you can, gazing with your own eyes, glancing the same glances as everyone else. And each breast bears some somnolent secret, each head is haunted by some melancholy or inspiring thought. Splendid, splendid.
“Beautiful park, I think, beautiful park” ends another piece that Walser, filled with wonder, wrote in 1907. The crowds of people continually enthralled him. He would describe the mass as a collective whole and then break it apart, looking into the heart of the individuals, often providing the darker parts of the sketches. “Friedrichstrasse,” one of my favorite pieces, describes a busy street during the day, but look how things change when Walser examines the street as night falls, recognizing something deep in each of his fellows:
and yet: what a ravishing, beguiling haste can be seen in all this ostensible packed-in-ness and sober-mindedness. The sun shines here upon countless heads in a single hour, the rain dampens and drenches a ground that is anointed, as it were, with comedies and tragedies, and in the evening, ah, when it begins to grow dark and the lamps are lit, a curtain slowly rises to reveal a play that is always sumptuously full of the same habits, acts of lechery, and occurrences. The siren Pleasure then begins to sing her divinely enticing, heavenly notes, and souls burst asunder amid all these vibrating wants and dissatisfactions, and a disgorging of money then commences that baffles the modest, clever understanding and can scarcely be envisioned, even with effort, by the poetic imagination. A bodily dream rising and falling with voluptuous breath then descends upon the street, and everything races, races, races with uncertain step in pursuit of this all-encompassing dream.
Berlin Stories isn’t the easiest book to review. As I mentioned, most of these aren’t traditional stories and, other than being about “Berlin,” there is no other continuity. But the composition of the collection itself is quite brilliant and offers a narrative of Walser’s time. We see Walser on that first page bursting out into the empty streets of the early morning, and the pieces that follow show Walser getting to know the busy city. Then we read Walser’s thoughts on the theater, where he spent considerable time since his brother was such a success. Then, if the sketches in “The City Streets” were bustling, “Berlin Life” steps back and lets a bit more silence enter. But not as much as comes in the final section, “Looking Back.” I said above, ”It seems impossible to get from such exuberance to that lonely Christmas Day.” These final pieces retain the vibrancy and lust for life that the earlier ones had, but the tone is a bit more subdued and a sense of loss pervades.
This little collection concludes its narrative with a piece from 1917 entitled “A Homecoming in the Snow,” so we almost get to that Christmas Day, after all, though the tone here mingles with sweetness:
On my way home, which struck me as splendid, it was snowing in thick, warm, large flakes. It seemed to me as if I heard homeland-like sounds ringing out from afar. My steps were brisk despite the deep snow through which I was assiduously wading. With every step I took, my shaken trust grew firmer again, which filled me with joy the way a child rejoices. All former things bloomed fragrantly and youthfully in my direction, like roses. It almost appeared to me as if the earth were singing a sweet Christmas melody that was at the same time a melody of spring. [. . .] I considered the snow itself a splendidly warm coat.
Perhaps I’ve been looking at that Christmas Day in 1956 all wrong all this time.
It doesn’t happen very often, but I love it when I pick up a book simply planning to scan the first few pages and find myself still reading an hour later. It’s wonderful to get completely swept away, and I must say it was completely unexpected when I picked up anarchist Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire, 1951; tr. from the French by Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis; 2012). I don’t know why I expected this book to be somewhat dry; this is an NYRB Classic, after all, and one thing I’ve learned is that their books are first and foremost superbly written in a manner that utilizes language to capture the reader.
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
Please note that I’m not in any way an expert on Victor Serge or his philosophies. While my minor as an undergrad was in modern European history, with a particular interest in the early twentieth century, I’m no longer so naïve as to think those few courses in any way gave me the ability to speak cogently on Marxism or on the Russian Revolution. So this “review” will not engage with the text as a body of philosophy. Just know that it is a fascinating perspective on a fascinating time in history by a masterful writer. I do know that much now.
Victor Serge (Victor Lvovich Kibalchich; 1890 – 1947) was born in Brussells to exiled Russian anti-Tsarists. In fact, this book begins with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, ten years before Serge was born. One of the men executed due to his role in the assassination was Nikolai Ivanovich Kibalchich, a distant relative. While Serge grew up, his parents kept on the wall a picture of those hanged for the assassination. That said, so powerful are Serge’s impressions from his youth that one feels he came to his views independently of his parents:
Even before I emerged from childhood, I seem to have experienced, deeply at heart, that paradoxical feeling which was to dominate me all through the first part of my life: that of living in a world without any possible escape. I felt repugnance, mingled with wrath and indignation, towards the people whom I saw settled comfortably in this world. How could they not be conscious of their captivity, of their unrighteousness? All this was a result, as I can see today, of my upbringing as the son of revolutionary exiles, tossed into the great cities of the West by the first political hurricanes blowing over Russia.
In its structure, the book is a chronological account of Serge’s life. Or, rather, it is a chronological account of the events Serge witnessed and the other revolutionaries Serge knew. There are powerful personal moments, such as the moment when Serge’s younger brother was dying of malnutrition: “I saw him wasting away. ‘If you don’t eat,’ I told him, ‘you’re going to die’ — but I had no idea what it was to die, and he even less so, so it did not frighten us.” And though he and his father “alone together” go to the cemetery, all of this that is personal is rather meant to direct our attention to the common plight of the group. Serge, who says he prefers “we” to “I,” doesn’t allow this memoir to focus on him. After a childhood where he thought life meant “Thou shalt think, thou shalt struggle, thou shalt be hungry,” Serge eventually adds “Thou shalt fight back.” This book is about that fight, which Serge joined very young, and the fighters lost on the way.
The principal opponent: capitalism, a system he saw as inherently corrupt and degrading, and he certainly found people who agreed with him:
“What do you want to be?” the anarchist asked young people in the middle of their studies. “Lawyers, to invoke the law of the rich, which is unjust by definition? Doctors, to tend the rich, and prescribe good food, fresh air, and rest to the consumptives of the slum? Architects, to house the landlords in comfort? Look around you, and then examine your conscience. Do you not understand that your duty is quite different: to ally yourselves with the exploited, and to work for the destruction of an intolerable system.”
Something I found very interesting is the tone in which Serge relates the early chapters of his life, which he wrote toward the end of his life, well after seeing the intolerable Stalinist regime take over in Russia. In other words, he is faithful to the feelings and tone of his youth, even if as an older man he might find some of the things slightly naïve, or at least much more complicated. Part of the reason, I suspect, is because as an older man he still believes in his younger self. Some of his ideas could be steered devastatingly off-course by the wrong person, but he remains confident that his ideas, that his pursuit for a more just society (knowing it was impossible, but what else should one do with one’s time), are correct.
This in and of itself leads to some interesting conundrums that Serge seemed to struggle with. For example, as a youth he wrote: “Life is not such a great benefit that it is wrong to lose it or criminal to take it.” That is a pithy line and easiest to digest if the cause one is dying for or killing for is one’s own. It’s obvious Serge still believes this even as an older man, but he has lived long enough to witness the unjust murder of many in an effort to prop up one of the most terrible regimes in the twentieth century. Through the book, I don’t think he ever fully reconciles his idea that violence is sometimes justified (though he abhorred it) with the idea that what is justified is a matter of perspective.
Serge does offer up some potential ways to get around this, though I don’t find them very convincing. For one thing, Serge was always against censorship. One of the failings of the Russian Revolution was that very soon after the government was toppled, the new government suppressed contrarian thought. It seems that the newly formed government recognized that dissent and anarchism was dangerous; after all, what majestic terrors had they been able to accomplish through just such means? But such suppression of thought went against something Serge felt even as a young man in Paris when he gazed out his window at Rodin’s The Thinker: “The bronze Thinker seemed to me to be meditating on that crime, and waiting to be shot himself. After all, how insolent he was, doing nothing but thinking, and how dangerous if he ever came to a conclusion.”
It’s a danger Serge knew his entire life. In one of the excellent introductions to this volume, Adam Hochschild remarks that Serge’s style is the result of urgency, of having many important things to write but not much time to do it before the authorities, whichever ones he was agitating at the time, would bust in and enact who knows what kind of violence.
And the book is filled with violence. The cast of characters is huge, and it seems that on every page one of them is shot or commits suicide, leading Serge to the conclusion that “my very existence was an infraction of the unwritten law of conformity.”
So, whatever your views on Serge’s ideas, here is a supreme volume where one can engage with such ideas from a clear and articulate mind, and one genuinely compassionate, perhaps a rare combination as the conversations go on in the news these days.
I’d only heard the name Nescio whispered here and there over the past few years (and I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of him at all before that). A Dutch master, well-known in his own country, 2012 marks the first time any of Nescio’s work is available in English, even though three of his major works were written before 1920. Then again, as Joseph O’Neill points out in his introduction to this edition, “It seems extraordinary that Nescio should have any reputation.” That’s because this short book (155 pages) contains all of his major work, published and unpublished. Amsterdam Stories (tr. from the Dutch by Damion Searls, 2012) is all we’re going to get, and knowing that this slim collection is the foundation for Nescio’s huge reputation set my expectations pretty high.
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
Nescio means “I dont’ know” in Latin, and it’s as if this is the response to all of the questions raised in his work (“And so everything takes its little course, and woe to those who ask: Why?”). Nescio is the pseudonym of Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönlof, a very successful director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company. From the stories, I’d never guess Grönlof and Nescio were the same person; I would rather suspect that Nescio was one of Grönlof’s employees and that Grönlof was the model for one of the despised bosses in Nescio’s stories, one of those “important gentlemen” who knocks the youth right out of you.
And for much of his life, Grönlof may indeed have been that boss. He wrote so little one can hardly say he lived the life of a writer. His four major works — major both because they form the basis of his reputation and because they are the longest pieces he published – are short stories: “The Freeloader” (thirty-one pages in this edition), ”Young Titans” (twenty-eight pages), “Little Poet” (forty-two pages), and “Insula Dei” (twenty-five pages). The remaining five pieces in this collection are tiny, ranging from a paragraph to a couple of pages; some are just excerpts of works in progress that never moved beyond the first burst of inspiration (but the burst is impressive). Though not voluminous, what Nescio did put on paper are some beautiful passages about that brief period in life when one arrives at the threshold of adulthood, filled with vague dreams and hopes for the future, that time when one realizes time is suddenly running out. This is a favorite theme of mine, nicely expressed recently by Steven Millhauser in “Getting Closer” (though there the unfortunate epiphany strikes a boy of only eleven) (my thoughts on “Getting Closer” here).
As fondly as Nescio looks back on this time period when one can still put up a decent, if illusory, fight against the future, Nescio doesn’t romanticize it as we might expect. It was beautiful, sure, but a life spent dreaming by the sea or chatting the evening away with friends in coffee shops, waiting to change the world, is untenable. For one thing, there’s the need for money. And vague dreams cease to fulfill (“Who can spend his life watching these things that constantly repeat themselves, who can keep longing for nothing?”). Of course, the tragedy of it all is that when we do start working to realize our dreams, time continues to move forward and we run out of time; furthermore, perhaps the very effort we expend to realize a dream becomes the toxic to the dream itself.
The first stories in this collection — “The Freeloader” and “Young Titans” — are my two favorites. They were finished in 1910 and 1914, respectively, when Nescio himself was passing into his early thirties. He had begun working at the Holland-Bombay Trading Company in 1904, was married in 1906, and already had three of his four daughters by 1910 (the fourth came along in 1912). This is the atmosphere in which he ruminated on the never-to-return carefree days of early adulthood (or late childhood). These two stories are narrated by Koekebakker (“cookie baker”), which was apparently Nescio’s first choice as a pseudonym, but it looks like the first magazine he published in objected (cookie baker is synonymous with ineptitude).
In “The Freeloader” Koekebakker tells about the most peculiar person he’s ever met (well, “[e]xcept for the man who thought Sarphatistraat was the most beautiful place in Europe.”), a freeloader named Japi. Koekebakker has a small group of young friends who, like him, are just starting out. They have little money and are already taking life seriously. But into their midst comes Japi, whom one of the friends met by the sea, having seen Japi sitting by the sea so much, it didn’t seem he ever left: “Then Japi had to laugh and he said, ‘I do sit by the water a lot, but “always” is a bit much. At night I lie in bed, I need an hour to get dressed and eat breakfast, I eat lunch for half an hour and at six I have to eat again. But I do sit by the water a lot.’”
Japi refuses the world of responsibility. His goal is to be nothing (“going places and thinking are only for stupid people”). Of course, the only way Japi can survive is by taking whatever he needs from others. He has tried work himself, but he’s not very good at it. Indeed, once when thinking about applying for work Japi even says that he thinks his soul is too big (Koekebakker thinks to himself “Can you believe it? That sponger!”). Yet, though selfish and naïve, what Jopi says is probably true — for all of us, but we shrink into routine office jobs anyway.
The story takes us through the years, and we see these boys turn into relatively successful men, no longer struggling to make money, but no longer certain they’ve ever done anything worth doing. Japi himself becomes, for a time, a very hard worker. There’s simply no other way around this life. But, though Koekebakker recognizes this tragedy, it hits Japi most severely, and later in life he reflects on the passage of time and — why?
And then, with a few variations, he repeated his old reverie about the water, how it flowed eternally to the west, out toward the sun every night. In Nijmegen there was a doctor who had taken the same walk at the same time every morning for fifty-three years — over the Valkhof hill and down the north side and up the Waalkade to the railroad bridge. That’s more than 19,300 times. And always the water flowed to the west. And it didn’t mean anything. It must have flowed like that for a hundred times fifty-three years. Longer. Now there’s a bridge over it. Every year is 365 day; ten years is 3,650 sunrises. Every day is 24 hours, and every hour more goes through the heads of all those constantly worrying people than you could set down in a thousand books. Thousands of worriers who saw that bridge are dead now. And still, it’s only been there a short time.
“Young Titans” goes over similar ground, but it still felt fresh to me (I read it right when I finished “The Freeloader”). Here’s how it begins; Koekebakker (or a version of him) is still our narrator:
We were kids — but good kids. If I may say so myself. We’re much smarter now, so smart it’s pathetic. Except for Bavink, who went crazy. Was there anything we didn’t want to set to rights? We would show them how it should be. “We”: that meant the five of us. Everyone else was “them,” the ones who didn’t see it, didn’t get it. “What?” Bavink said. “God?” You want to talk about God? Their pot roast is their God.” Other than a few “decent fellows” we despised everyone — and secretly, I still think we were right. But I can’t say that out loud to anyone. I’m not a hero anymore.
Here are five friends we met in “The Freeloader,” but they are either slightly varied or this is before Japi came along (he never shows in “Young Titans”) because when “Young Titans” begins the five young men are still in the early phase of the transition to responsibility, still fairly certain the pathway they’d take through life would somehow stay as free as they then felt. Not that they understood that freedom.
No, we didn’t actually do anything. We did our work at the office, not all that well, for bosses we despised — except Bavink and Hoyer, who had no bosses, and who didn’t understand why we went in to see ours every day.
But we were waiting. For what? We never knew.
“Young Titans” again move us through the years. Some of the friends become very successful “important gentlemen,” running offices now. Koekebakker may be the only one aware enough to see the transition occur and who looks back on that time with what might be suspicion as much as longing. The seaside where they watched the waves is still there, the waves still coming to shore. The hope and contentment they felt was theirs seems to be just an illusion that many had before and many will yet have:
It was a strange time. And when I think about it, I realize that that time must still be happening now, it will last as long as there are young men of nineteen or twenty running around. It’s only for us that the time is long since past.
And if the peace and contentment of youth passes away time and time again, and the world doesn’t do anything about it — indeed, doesn’t seem to notice (“We were gloomy about all the things that had passed, and about our lives, which would end while these things continued to exist.”) — then what is it all for?
Amsterdam Stories is organized chronologically, and “The Freeloader” and “Young Titans” are the earliest works. There are a few short segments before we get to his next major work (and his longest), “Little Poet,” written in 1917. While I missed Koekebakker and his friends, it was also nice to see Nescio move to a different cast of characters to work out his themes, this time including love and lust. It felt darker and a bit more sinister than his earlier work, but it also had some moments of brilliant levity, such as the time when Nescio addresses the reader directly. See, the Little Poet’s wife recopies his work, as does Nescio’s, but the Little Poet’s mind has become unfaithful:
It’s strange, in other stories she reads she doesn’t think things along these lines are that bad. I think it’s because I’m the one who wrote this story. Of course, she knows there’s a difference between the author and Mr. Nescio himself, but to her that’s splitting hairs. It’s a difficult situation. My domestic bliss is somewhat troubled — but still I’ll keep going.
There are a few more short pieces between “Little Poet” and Nescio’s final major work “Insula Dei,” which he wrote in 1942. But for the most part, the 1920s and 1930s were fallow years. Nescio became director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company in 1926 and retired in 1937 (“I’m free, after forty years I’m free, and I can cut my hair whenever I feel like it and let it grow too if I want”). Certainly if at nineteen or twenty Nescio had the dream to live the life of the mind, he recognized what it was like to sacrifice that for a life of making money for a family, though he lamented this fact later in life:
My life is too short, I can’t go any faster, my work is a cathedral and I need a long time, centuries. And how much longer do I have?
It’s as if Nescio himself ran out of time, as if he thought he’d be able to write plenty through life but work came and then death brought a stop to it all. Fortunately for us, his work is available, and though the water is still flowing to the west, we can remember the work Nescio did.
As thrilled as I am about this years’ Best Translated Book Award longlist – and I am very thrilled — I was surprised that nothing from NYRB Classics showed up. After all, last year they published the winning book. Then again, in 2010, Melville House published the winning book and was not on the list in 2011. I’m certainly not suggesting any trend, and I say the more publishers recognized for publishing quality literature in translation the better. But, in its absence, I thought I’d look at another book that NYRB Classics published a couple of years ago: Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (Sommarboken, 1972; tr. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, 1974). Last year’s BTBA winning book was, by the way, Tove Jannson’s The True Deceiver, which was also translated by Thomas Teal (my review here).
This is perhaps one of the most serene books I have ever read, which is a bit strange since there is so much turbulence under the surface. The book takes place during one particular summer where each day may be slow but is also filled with life. The young child Sophia is spending the summer with her grandmother on an island in the Gulf of Finland. Sophia is just young enough that this is one of the first summers during which she is awake.
I’d say it’s the perfect primer for spring if you, like me, get antsy for warm weather at this time of year. As Sophia and her grandmother explore the island and enjoy watching the evening approach, followed by night, I couldn’t help but recall such peaceful days. The community, though dispersed across the island, is relatively close knit. They go through the seasons and the storms together.
Despite this, anyone else, including Sophia’s nearly absent father, feel like outsiders when they interact with Sophia and her grandmother. There is one episode in the book where a poor girl comes to visit, and she’s neither from the island nor part of Sophia and Grandmother’s circle. Jansson reminds us, “An island can be dreadful for someone from the outside.” There’s genuine darkness to this episode, but Jansson lightens it a little bit:
On the third day, Sophia came into the guest room and said, “Well, that does it. She’s impossible. I got her to dive, but it didn’t help.”
“Did she really dive?” Grandmother asked.
“Yes, really. I gave her a shove and she dived.”
“Oh,” Grandmother said. “And then what?”
“Her hair can’t take salt water,” explained Sophia sadly. “It looks awful. And it was her hair I liked.”
Burried even deeper in the book is lurking death. Sophia is just waking up to life, but her grandmother is descending, more and more without caring, to death, and Sophia just about comprehends this. This is accentuated once in the book when, in a passage so brief you just might miss it, Sophia wakes up and remembers “she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead.” The absence of her mother, the presence of death, pervade even the most peaceful passages, giving everything multiple tones and textures, most often conveyed in passages of seemingly simple dialogue, like this one (though this one is not nearly as subtle as the rest of the book — the outburst by the grandmother is a moment of vulnerability that most often is covered up):
“I couldn’t sleep,” Grandmother said, “and I got to thinking about sad things.” She sat up in bed and reached for her cigarettes. Sophia handed her the matches automatically, but she was thinking about other things.
“You’ve got two blankets, don’t you?” Sophia said.
“I mean it all seems to shrink up and glide away,” Grandmother said. “And things that were a lot of fun don’t mean anything any more. It makes me feel cheated, like what was the point? At least you ought to be able to talk about it.”
Sophia was getting cold again. They had let her sleep in a tent, even though she was too little to sleep in a tent. None of them knew what it was like, and they had just let her sleep in the ravine all by herself. “Oh is that so?” she said angrily. “What do you mean it’s no fun?”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Grandmother said. “All I said was that when you’re as old as I am, there are a lot of things you can’t do any more . . .”
“That’s not true! You do everything. You do the same things I do!”
“Wait a minute!” Grandmother said. She was very upset. “I’m not through! I know I do everything. I’ve been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I’ve seen and lived as hard as I could, and it’s been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything’s gliding away from me, and I don’t remember, and I don’t care, and yet now is right when I need it!”
“What don’t you remember?” asked Sophia anxiously.
“What it was like to sleep in a tent!” her Grandmother shouted.
The memories that Sophia is in the process of making this summer are ones that the grandmother is already losing, at once not caring and yet worrying deeply about her apathy.
I’ve now read the three Jansson books that NYRB Classics has published. I hope there are more in the works because as short as they are they contain a lot of life and are three of my favorite books.
When I read Henry James, I always come away feeling somehow haunted. Ghosts of dreams and passion run through the pages, and physical death, at times, seems almost redundant. Consequently, Jean Strouse’s marvelous Alice James: A Biography (1980) struck me as particularly Jamesian.
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
Alice James was the youngest child of Henry James, Sr. and Mary Walsh James. She had four older brothers, the two oldest being William and Henry, commonly (and rightly) considered two of the greatest minds in American history. In learning about William and Henry I’d heard of Alice, but really I knew nothing about her. I am extremely happy to say that I enjoyed learning about her from Strouse as much (well, almost) as learning anything from William and Henry.
Strouse opens the biography with the control of and insight into the material we soon realize we will find on each page:
“When I am gone,” Alice James wrote to her brother William as she was dying, “pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born.”
By neurotic science she meant the science of nervous disorders, since her existence had long been dominated by mysterious illnesses for which no organic cause could be discovered and no cure found. Her prescient plea to William insisted that her life be judged on its own terms, without apology or excuse. At the same time, it recognized the temptation her friends and posterity would feel to explain her somehow, to imagine what she might have been. And in recognizing that temptation, Alice acknowledged that her life appeared to have been a failure.
This sense of failure due to sickness (though not the plea to be judged on her own terms) immediately brought to mind the character Mrs. Costello in Henry James’ ”Daisy Miller”: “Mrs. Costello was a widow with a fortune; a person of much distinction, who frequently intimated that, if she were not so dreadfully liable to sick-headaches, she would probably have left a deeper impress upon her time” (my review of “Daisy Miller” — which includes the quote — here). Indeed, Alice James had a brilliant mind which she applied to culture and politics, though her mental and physical capacity couldn’t support it. Of course, we’re talking about society at the end of the nineteenth century: the odds of Alice making use of her brilliant mind, regardless of physical problems, were never going to be good, something Henry James picked up on early.
The James family had the money to chase education wherever they thought they’d find it (and Henry James, Sr. spent his time trying to figure out the best way to parent and educate children), so the James children enjoyed “a sensuous education” from American and Europe. But as much as Alice was encouraged to partake, she was still expected to remain at home, waiting to get married (she never did get married — no signs she ever had any love interest). As much as she loved her father and as much as he supported the development of her intellect, years later, in her now famous diary, “[s]he could not turn the towering rage that comes through in her writing even twenty years after the experience itself against the kind father who had so blithely stimulated and thwarted her.”
While Strouse makes it clear that Alice was highly intelligent (something her two oldest brothers, especially Henry, saw and seemed to appreciate) and was thwarted by her father, this biography doesn’t go so far as to definitively blame her fragile mental state on anyone. Though the relationship caused strain, Alice was obviously close to her father, even going so far as to discuss her suicidal thoughts with him, receiving, in the process, his permission to commit suicide as long as it was truly the best option and she did it in a way that wouldn’t upset everyone. She thanked him for his permission (and he effectively took away her opportunity to rebel against him by committing suicide, since he now permitted it, which seems to have been his intent all along). Alice was also very close to William, and he seemed at times to be strangely flirtatious with her. Strouse downplays the potential connections, but it was in the summer of 1878 when she had the first, and maybe her worst, major breakdown, just before William was married.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Alice and William had anything untoward in their relationship. Alice’s breakdown seemed to coincide with times when someone’s affections threatened to be focused elsewhere, whether it was William or, later, Alice’s dearest friend Katherine Peabody Loring (another relationship where Strouse emphasizes that there is no real evidence that there was anything other than strong mutual, unsexual affection on both sides). Strouse presents Alice’s infirmity as a means to get people to focus on her, however intentional or not it may have been. Late in her relatively short life (she lived from 1848 and died of breast cancer in 1892), she was too sick to go anywhere and was tended closely by her brother Henry and Katherine Loring. She was simply waiting for death:
“The fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me as I faced a ceaseless possible horror, since that hideous summer of ’78 when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me, and I knew neither hope nor peace; that now it’s only the shrivelling of an empty pea pod that has to be completed.”
It was also late in her life that Alice started her diary, which in large part she dictated to Katherine Loring. This is her literary legacy, and it has been said to be the equal of anything Henry or William wrote (I’ve never read the diary and find this hard to believe, but she certainly shows a sensitivity to the nuances in the world around her and an ability to look coldly inward that we might expect in William and Henry’s writing). William and Henry found out about the diary only after Alice died. Their responses to it are fascinating. Henry’s in particular shows just how insightful that man was as he seems to get Alice’s predicament perfectly:
The diary, he wrote, had impressed him immensely, “but it also puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her lifetime — that the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a ‘well’ person — in the usual world — almost impossible to her — so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problem of life — as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc.”
As a final note, though Strouse keeps the focus on Alice throughout, this book is also a great look at the entire James family. It doesn’t overlook the two middle brothers, Wilki and Rob, and some of the best portions are spent looking at potential ways Alice’s life affected William and Henry’s work (Strouse later brings up the potential connection between Alice and Mrs. Costello). I enjoyed each page and highly recommend it.
I’m not one to go digging around for old psychological studies — or any old studies, for that matter. Because of this, it is unlikely I would have ever heard of Milton Rokeach’s fascinating The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (1964). Why did I end up purchasing and reading this? It’s an NYRB Classic. That’s enough. If they publish a psychological study from fifty years ago, that means it’s worth reading. This one is.
In 1959, Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist working at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, brought together three patients who each firmly believed hunca life katalog he was Jesus Christ. Rokeach says, “Initially, my main purpose in bringing them together was to explore the processes by which their delusional systems of belief and their hunca life behavior might hunca life change if they were confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”
His study was inspired in part on an account set out by Voltaire in which a man, Simon Morin, believing he was Christ ran into another man proclaiming to be Christ. Simon exclaimed that the other must be crazy and, realizing what this meant, was cured of his delusion for a time (though he was eventually huncalife katalog burned at the stake). As he introduces the study, Rokeach says, “This is the only study on which I have ever worked that has aroused the interest of children.” I must say, it’s easy to see why. This is a fascinating look into the minds of three disturbed men.
The three patients are not referred to by their real names, though the book is so well written that these names, as simple as they are, are permanently part of my literary consciousness.
Clyde Benson was the oldest. At 70, he had been hospitalized for 17 years after suffering from a series of tragedies in a short period of time that took from him his parents and his wife (in a botched abortion). Rokeach makes the case that Mr. Benson was never really his own man, that since childhood he had allowed others to make decisions for him, and the strain of losing these authorities in his life was too much. In this book, Mr. Benson is easily forgotten. He’s always sitting there during the meetings, but he rarely speaks, or if he does it is mostly gibberish. Perhaps because of this, Rokeach rarely has the book focus on him, though he does have some good lines, like this one:
Late at night. All fifteen patients in the dorm are in their beds, but there is a great deal of restlessness because one of the patients is snoring loudly. Finally one of the patients, exasperated, yells: “Jesus Christ! Quit that snoring.” Whereupon Clyde, rearing up in his bed, replies: “That wasn’t me who was snoring. It was him!”
Joseph Cassel was 58 and had been hospitalized for nearly 20 years. A timid man, he grew up with a strict father (who called him Josephine) in a french-speaking household in Canada. Perhaps as a response to the fact that he was not allowed to bring anything “English” into the home, Joseph, besides considering himself Jesus Christ, also considers himself a patriot of England, who protects him and whom he protects. One of the strangest accounts in the study is one when, in peril of losing his beloved placebos, Joseph still will not say that the hospital is not an English stronghold. He doesn’t even have to believe this to keep his placebos; he need only pretend — to lie. He won’t do it. Interestingly, Rokeach notes that had he lied, it would have been a sign of improvement.
The youngest was Leon Gabor, at 38, who had been hospitalized for five years already. Leon was raised by a super-religious mother who, by all evidence, was severely psychotic herself. She instilled in Leon a profound sense of sexual guilt that he struggles with through the entire book, particularly since he is probably gay. Leon receives a great deal of attention throughout the book. He’s vocal and causes the most conflicts. It also seems he is the smartest, or, at least, he is the only one of the men who doesn’t simply deny the others’ claims but tries to reconcile everything. Rokeach seems particularly hopeful that Leon can be helped.
So Clyde, Joseph, and Leon are brought together. They sleep in adjacent beds, eat in the same room, have the same work duties, and hold meetings each day. The meetings take up a large part of the book as we watch these men interact with each other, sometimes with a great deal of tension and sometimes with what can almost be brotherly love — I say “almost” because even though the relationship gives them some contact they desperately desire, they also desperately want to hold on to their beliefs and fret each time they are challenged.
Remarkably, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is not clinical in tone. Indeed, Rokeach has a great sense of tone, understatement, and timing, that one would think he was also a great novelist. These men are brought to life before our eyes, and we feel their pain and feel compassion towards them. Some parts are funny (like the “squelch eye” incident), and many are incredibly sad.
Yes, it’s very sad, and we can credit Rokeach for helping us feel these emotions through his highly skilled presentation. However, we can also blame him for being the source of some of the more terrible passage. This is a deeply troubling book. In his afterword, written twenty years later, Rokeach doesn’t apologize for his experiment, but he admits that, in a way, there were four men who thought they were god — the three patients and himself, the psychologist who, albeit in the pursuit of knowledge and in the hopes of helping the men, played with their lives.
In the introduction, Rokeach explains that while the initial plan was to see what happened when these men were brought together, “[s]ubsequently, a second purpose emerged: an exploration of the processes by which systems of belief and behavior might be changed through messages purporting to come from significant authorities who existed only in the imaginations of the delusional Christs.” Fully hoping to help these men out, constantly scrutinizing ethical concerns, Rokeach assumes writes letters to Joseph and Leon pretending to be authority figures from their delusions. For example, Joseph rejects his real father (to an extent — he calls him Josephine after all) and has taken to calling the head of Ypsilanti “dad.” With permission from “dad,” Rokeach begins writing to Joseph, asking him to do certain things, hoping that because of his trust in this authority figure, Joseph will begin to changes some of his delusions. This failed, as shown above when Joseph simply would not disclaim that the hospital was an English stronghold.
But even more heart-breaking and cruel were Rokeach’s letters to Leon in which Rokeach assumed the guise of Leon’s non-existent wife. Though never married, Leon often buttressed his claims to godliness by giving details about fictional women in his life, many of whom were gods in their own right and who became his wife. But does Leon actually believe in these women? And what if he received a letter from one? Here is his response to the first:
Leon’s initial response is disbelief. Without divulging the contents of the letter, he tells the aide that although he has never seen his wife’s handwriting he knows that she didn’t write or sign this letter. He says further that he doesn’t like the idea of people imposing on his beliefs and that he is going to look into this.
A couple of hours later, during the daily meeting, we notice Leon is extremely depressed and we ask him why. He evasively replies that he is meditating, but he does not mention the letter. This is the first time, as far as we know, that he has ever kept information from us.
August 4. This is the day Leon’s wife is supposed to visit him. He goes outdoors shortly before the appointed hour and does not return until it is well past.
So, yes, both Leon and Joseph believe in the delusions they have constructed, and in assuming these authorities’ voices, Rokeach, in a way, assumes the role of a god in the lives of these troubled men.
As I said above, the book is hardly clinical in its tone. It does not read like a study at all but rather like a deeply felt narrative of the troubles of these three men who came together for a time in Ypsilanti State Hospital. I highly recommend it.
A couple of years ago, NYRB Classics introduced most of us to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky when they published Memories of the Future. Krzhizhanovsky died in 1950 having lost most of his battles to publish his work to the Soviet censors (of his hundreds of stories, plays, criticism, etc., he published only nine stories in his lifetime). His work remained archived until it was uncovered in 1976. Even after that, it wasn’t until 1989 that much his work first began being published in Russian. Finally, his work is trickling into English, and we’re catching on to the fact that here we have one of the greatest Russian authors of the twentieth century. Recently, NYRB Classics has published another of his works, The Letter Killers Club (Klub ubiits bukv; tr. from the Russian by Joanne Turnbaull with Nikolai Formozov, 2011).
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
One doesn’t have to read far into this book to figure out why the Soviet censors — in particular, Maxim Gorky – considered Krzhizhanovsky ”untimely.” Here we meet a kind of secret organization of men – all using pseudonyms – who meet in a room surrounded by empty book shelves. They shun the written word, yet they meet every Saturday evening to tell each other their “conceptions,” short pieces of fiction that, very importantly, were not and will not be written down. And they come up with the strangest things . . .
But before we get into that, there is some reason to this ritual. Our narrator is a literary man, and one day he is shocked to discover that a famous writer has decided to quit writing. The narrator finds the man and asks him what is going on, and the man (the eventual founder of The Letter Killers Club) explains. When he was a poor young man, he loved reading and was proud of his library, despite his modest circumstances. But when he received word that his mother had died, he had to sell his entire library in order to make the trip to her funeral. Returning to his room with its empty bookshelves, the man discovered that these empty bookshelves still held the weight of their ideas, and the act of reimagining the books allowed him to succeed in his own writing. Eventually, though, he has rounded up all of his words and his ideas have become pent-up in his books. He longs for the freedom he felt imagining stories before they became limited by the page.
Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines were living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen’s nib as tamed animals do the raised whip. Or a better analogy: do you know about the production of astrakhan fur? Suppliers have their own terminology: they track the patterns of the unborn lamb’s wool, wait for the necessary combination of curls, then kill the lamb — before birth: they call that “clinching the pattern.” That is exactly what we — trappers and killers — do with our conceptions.
So this man, the president of The Letter Killers Club, invites our narrator to one of their meetings. On each Saturday, one of the members stands up and recites a conception. The other members comment, critique, and reimagine the story as it meanders around. This seems innocent enough, but the air of secrecy invokes the fear of a secret society. Perhaps more strangely, the members themselves feel some amount of fear toward the president of the club.
The stories themselves are all fun to read. Krzhizhanovsky favors the surreal and absurd, and his mindset is enmeshed in experimental modernism. The first story takes us to Hamlet. To show how inseparable Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are, the teller also splits Guildenstern into two characters: Guilden and Stern. Guilden and Stern are both in love with Phelia and both hope to win the role of Hamlet in an upcoming production. Soon “Role” itself comes out and speaks to Guilden and Stern, and discusses how it is to be best played, including a short bit on how it has been portrayed in the past. This particular story is a bit convoluted, but, as I said, it is fun. Better stories follow.
In particular, I was taken by a remarkable science-fiction tale where a few men, building off of each other’s ideas, are attempting to figure out a way to take over a human being’s physical movements. In other words, they want to find a way to quash the individual human will and use that body to do their own will.
Anonym’s ideas had the immediate effect of broadening Tutus’s outlook and the scope of his experiments: he realized that the machine must take control of those human movements and muscular contractions that had a clear social significance. Anonym maintained that reality, whose component parts are actions, had “too many parts and too small a sum.” Only by taking innervation away from a separately functioning nervous systems and giving it to a single, central innervator, said Anonym, could one organize reality according to plan and put paid to that amateurish “I.” By replacing the jolts from individual wills with the jolts from one “ethical machine” built according to the latest advances in morals and technology, one could make everyone give everything back: a complete ex.
However, so complex is the human body and the human mind that all experiments keep being ruined by “unaccountable scrawls of will.” But there is a breakthrough:
After three weeks of attempts to break through to life, the tightly tied sack of skin and fat, pushing the pencil lead inserted between its limp fingers, managed to scrawl: kill myself. Tutus pondered the plan and decided to turn it into a sort of experimentum crucis: even in his experiments with this seemingly completely demuscled subject, the work of the mechanical innervator had been spoilt by unaccountable scrawls of will that got mixed up in the machine’s precise musical score. It was impossible to anticipate every form of volitional resistance; what’s more, an experiment with suicide was bound to involve a moment of violent conflict between the will of the machine and that of the man. Tutus proceeded as follows: having quietly emptied a bullet case of its gunpowder, he slipped the cartridge — in full view of his subject — into the cylinder of a revolver, cocked the trigger, and enfolded the weapon of death in the inert fingers. Now the machine went to work: the fingers twitched, then gripped the gun handle; the forefinger produced an incorrect reflex — Tutus adjusted the refractory finger inside the trigger’s curve. another press of the key — the man’s arm sprang up, bent at the elbow, and brought the barrel to his temple. Tutus scrutinized the subject: his facial muscles showed no signs of resistance; true, his eyelashes fluttered and the points of his pupils had become large black blots. “Very good,” Tutus muttered, turning around to press the next key — but how strange, the key was stuck. Tutus pressed harder: he heard a metallic click. First he inspected his machine, depressing and releasing the key that had now come unstuck. Then he flipped some switches, and suddenly the human sack with the incomprehensible self-will pitched forward, flapped its arms like a bird shot in flight, and slumped to the floor. Tutus dashed up: the subject was dead.
Krzhizhanovsky’s work was “untimely,” indeed.
This is not the only suicide in the book. As the club members continue to meet, the narrator is increasingly unsettled by what they are doing and the basis for their weekly meetings. He thinks he may see discontent among other members as well and seeks to speak with them about what is going on these Saturday evenings.
I read a lot of great books this year, but I believe this is the best of them all. It is incredible that such a voice was unheard for most of a century and was nearly lost for good. Makes one wonder about all of those voices we haven’t been so fortunate to recover.
I knew nothing about Gyula Krúdy or about this book before picking it up — what does this Hungarian have to do with the more famous Persian sailor? – but with NYRB Classics one doesn’t have to worry too much about such things. One can just pick up a book and begin. And when I opened up The Adventures of Sindbad (Szindbád Három Könyve, 1944; tr. from the Hungarian by George Szirtes, 1998) I was in for many pleasant surprises.
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
Krúdy was a prolific writer who lived from 1878 to 1933, and he wrote many stories focused on the young (or old — or dead — or mistletoed) Sindbad, from 1911 to 1917. Here we have them collected in one volume. In his introduction, translator George Szirtes tells readers what’s to come, though I don’t think we can entirely understand until we read the stories. They are so unique, in Hungary there is a term: “Krúdyesque.” I think a good example, then, is to refer to the other “-esque” author from roughly the same period: Can you imagine trying to explain — beyond simple plot – a Kafka story to someone who hadn’t experienced the Kafkaesque first-hand? Me either. So here we have the Krúdyesque, which Szirtes aptly describes: “an experience comprised of the nostalgic, the fantastic and the ironic.”
We first meet Sindbad in “Youth,” a rather conventional story that in no way foreshadows the strangeness that is to come, though it does touch upon central themes, particularly love and lust. The story begins by taking us to “a damp and moonlit night” when an old man is “watching the autumn mist form figures of chimney-sweeps on the rooftops.” His mind is taken to an old monastery where, as a child, he used to see a painting of an intimidating and authoritative Prince Lubomirski. The red-bearded, shaggy-haired Prince has been dead for two centuries, but still “[t]he young ladies of Podolin who came to the monks for absolution would wreathe his picture with flowers fresh from the meadow, and women, who a couple of centuries before would have given birth to red-bearded, shaggy-haired children, prayed before the prince’s image precisely as they did before pictures of the saints.”
This opening – the introduction of an old man looking back to a painting of someone then two-centuries’ dead, as well as the adoration of the image – foreshadows the idea that the boundaries of time do not always hold up. Sure, two centuries ago the Prince would remove his gloves in the presence of ladies and cannot do so now, but that isn’t stopping their current adoration.
We soon learn that the old man in “Youth” is Sindbad, who was a student at the monastery. Because “in those days” it was common for romantic souls to choose their own name, Sindbad indeed named himself after the sailor in The Thousand and One Nights. In many ways, this collection of short stories is just as varied in time and form as The Thousand and One Nights, and just as populated with a type of mystical eroticism. And, perhaps in homage to the tales, Krúdy wastes no time giving us a conclusion that keeps us wondering “How did all this happen?”: “It was in this office one Sunday, while wearing his red surplice, that [Sindbad] succeeded in seducing Anna Kacksó, who had come to Mass along with a few friends of hers.”
But this is a false start (one of many). As the story moves from “How did all this happen?,” we meet Anna’s two sisters and the story focuses on Róza, the youngest, the real love interest. Róza teases Sindbad as they study together. Sindbad deals with this by playing with a fellow classmate he often picks on, Pope Gregory (his chosen name), who has a hunchback. Róza is mean and withholds affection. Sindbad deals with this by going swimming with Pope Gregory. Krúdy has the ability here to make the reader’s mind become quiet.
Naturally, the boys bathed in the deep still water, holding on to the iron staples in the timber, dangling their legs in the bottomless pool. The little hunchback felt absolutely safe in the company of the brave and admirable Sindbad. Suddenly he gave a triumphant cry, ‘Hey, I can feel the river bed here!’ He extended his thin legs. His inky fingers let go of the metal bar and the water silently closed over him. For a brief second Sindbad could still see the curious hump on his back under the surface of the river, then the water, the shore and the tall limes nearby grew unaccountably quiet as if the monastery had touched them with a magic wand and they had died on the spot, as in The Thousand and One Nights.
Sindbad is terrified. He searches for Pope Gregory, imagining that the Prince is already coming out of his gilt frame, knowing he will be blamed for the drowning. The story ends (it’s a short story, and the first of many, so I don’t feel terrible giving all of this away) with Sindbad in bed, and Róza leans over and whispers into his ear: “You are a brave boy. And I will love you for ever now.”
It’s a dark story. The death of a foolishly trusting young boy is used to move the action between a young man and a young woman. I immediately turned to the next one.
As I mentioned above, “Youth” is a bit more conventional than the rest, and because of this is kind of an outlier. In some stories, he is dreaming. In one he is a sprig of mistletoe. But painful love remains because Sindbad is always “a tireless voyager, a friend to women, a knight errant for those in sleepy provincial towns; he was the last worldly thought of virgins about to enter convents and the hope of the ageing.” In fact, not even death (Sindbad is dead in many of the stories but just as mobile and influential as Sindbad imagined the Prince to be) can stop him. That last line I quote, in fact, comes from a passage where Sindbad is wandering out of the graveyard periodically for affairs before returning, listening to the rain on the gravestones for maybe a year, and then lying in the crypt to talk to his dead relatives around him.
That image — returning to a graveyard after an affair, sitting pensively in the rain, then communicating with the dead, all the while waiting for the next affair to start — encapsulates a lot of the feelings in the book. There’s a lot of wandering through space and time, and melancholic (but somehow pleasant) love prevails, so well, in fact, that even the grave is nothing terrible — a moment to yearn, thus making the heart grow even more. Of course, all of that is still tinged with shadow and is quite disturbing if you think about it. It is beautifully done here, in the same way, say, a dusty wedding dress from the 1850s — that someone died in — is beautiful.
One aspect of the book that I cannot comment on other than to pass along what I read is the fact that these stories were written at the end of the Hapsburg Empire. Hungary would no longer be the Hungary of these tales, and both the introduction and the book’s blurb speak about “the uncanny evocation of the Hapsburg Empire.” As I said, I cannot comment on this because I know so little about this time period at that part of the world. What I experienced while reading the book, however, was just that nostalgia, fantasy, and irony — the Krúdyesque, and I could see connections with the ending of an epoch — autumn or early winter is a great time to read this fantastic book.
Earlier this year, Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver won the Best Translated Book Award (my review of the book here). It’s an excellent book, quite wintry, that I highly recommend if you’re feeling too warm this summer (well, I strongly recommend it even if you aren’t). I’m happy to say I liked Jansson’s Fair Play (Rent spel, 1982; tr. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, 2007) even more. It’s not necessarily summery, but if you’re feeling a bit chilly, this book will warm you up with its subtle love. Hmm, if I “highly” recommended The True Deceiver, I’d best “strongly” recommend Fair Play.
Fair Play concerns two old women, Jonna and Mari. They are best friends and for years have been happy to limit their society to each other. Each is an artist, and they live on a tiny island on the southern side of Finland; there’s a great line when they’re on the ocean during a fog and worry they’re going to end up in Estonia. When they venture out on it, the sea creates a great atmosphere and emphasizes their solidarity and remoteness. So does the apartment complex the two women live in; one lives on one side, the other lives on the other, but there’s a well tread path through the attic that lies in between.
The book is short — just over 100 pages — and it feels shorter still as it is separated into 17 very short chapters that stand fairly well alone, as much as the relationship’s many layers are revealed in each, whether they are redecorating or sitting down to watch movies.
“Mari,” she said, “are you unhappy that we don’t see people?”
“No, not anymore.”
“That’s good. I mean, if we did see them, what would it be like? Like always, exactly like always. Pointless chatter about inessentials. No composition, no guiding idea. No theme. Isn’t that right? [. . .]“
They’ve been together for a long time and have, so far, survived everything that has stood in the way of their continued friendship, including the time that Jonna shot the island gull:
“Typical,” Jonna said. “Of course you had to be the one to find it. Well, okay, I’m sorry. I shot it.” And she added, “At a hundred meters.”
That quote, besides introducing a long period of silence (they fight like old friends too), shows some of the book’s humor that Jansson injects on the sly in dialogue spoken on the side, the way Jonna and Mari express many of their emotions. In fact, sometimes the turmoil is not expressed at all; rather, we feel their discomfort by the way they look at the room around them.
This turmoil is an integral part of the book. On the one hand, their lives look stable, but in actuality their friendship is threatened from many sides. For one thing, they are getting older. It simply cannot last. Also, despite their age, they still have plans for life that might not include the other person. In each section, there is the potential for separation.
Strangely, despite this, the book is also a testament to stability and solidarity. There is certainly the sense that all will continue on as it has for years, and this too is implied subtly, though, impressively, at the same time the threat is implied.
They waited, but nothing more happened.
I purchased Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver (Den ärliga bedragaren, 1982; tr. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, 2009) quite some time ago. I heard great things about it and found the cover, featuring art by Jansson herself, very attractive — as I always seem to do with books from NYRB Classics. However, when I pulled the book out in the dead of winter, its opening page made me colder and I put it up. When I pulled it out in the spring, well, again, it made me feel cold. A year later, the book has won the Best Translated Book Award, an award worth following faithfully. Obviously, that was the ticket. Here’s a quick spoiler to my review below: I liked this book so much I’ve since gone out and read the other two Jansson books that NYRB Classics has published — The Summer Book and Fair Play – and I liked them even more.
As I said above, the opening to the book is cold, which is fitting, yes, because it is an early dark winter morning, but also because we are meeting the coldest character, Katri. Katri is 25. She and her brother Mats, who is 15, live in a tiny room above the town’s shop along with the big dog, who has no name. Katri is coldly calculating, tremendously good with numbers, which is a gift of dubious value when she uses similar arithmetic, like an economist, to analyze other aspects of society. Nevertheless, her reputation for analyzing a situation and coming up with a fair, honest solution that adds up is such that many people in town come to her for advice:
Katri’s advice was widely discussed in the village and struck people as correct and very astute. What made it so effective, perhaps, was that she worked on the assumption that every household was naturally hostile towards its neighbors. But people’s sessions with Katri were often followed by an odd sense of shame, which was hard to understand, since she was always fair. Take the case of two families who had been looking sideways at each other for years. Katri helped both save face, but she also articulated their hostility and so fixed it in place for all time.
The advice she gives out matches her perception of the world, which is that it is self-interested and not to be trusted. She believes people’s affairs should be governed without emotion and her method of combatting emotion is through what she considers honesty, even if that honesty isn’t pleasant.
Katri is not satisfied with her and Mats’ situation, so she has a plan to make their lives more comfortable. Anna Aemelin is an older woman who lives alone. A celebrated children’s books artist, famous particularly for her incredible renderings of the forest floor when the snow is gone, she has plenty of money she doesn’t know how to handle, not that she cares. She and Katri are quite different, but both sit on the periphery of society. For Anna it isn’t because she’s cold and honest; rather, it’s her artistic temperament and her success: “she was only fully alive when she devoted herself to her singular ability to draw, and when she drew she was naturally always alone.” We know from the outset that Katri is searching for some way to move in with Anna. To start her goal, she goes to the town messenger and offers to take Anna her mail:
“Are you trying to help?”
“You know I’m not,” Katri said. “I’m doing it entirely for my own sake. Do you trust me or don’t you?”
The messenger, sure that Katri is the most honest person he knows — after all, she admitted right there that she’s delivering for her own purpose — gives Katri the mail, and Katri gets her first glimpse into the home of Anna Aemelin. She doesn’t say anything to Anna, but neither does Katri try to look inconspicuous as she scrutinizes the abode, knowing full well that it all adds up: she and Mats will live her soon.
Naturally she wants a fluffy floor. Carpet or no carpet, it’s all fluffy in here anyway — hot and hairy. Maybe there’s more air upstairs. We’ll have to crack the window at night or Mats won’t be able to sleep.
But there’s much more to the book than this. It is a rather dark character study, bitter yet empathetic. We sense personal demons on every page, even though for the most part the snow is falling in the dark and all appears at peace, or at least empty. As cool and controlled as Katri appears to be, we can feel a deep well of emotion under the surface. For one, she has a deep motherly love for Mats. She’ll do anything to protect him, and that is the main object of her plans to move in with Anna. She also has a deep hatred for the shopkeeper over whose shop she lives. Her objectivity is tested time and again as she claims he’s a swindler, an awful man. Perhaps he is, but we can’t fail to note that Katri hates him because he once loved her. Honestly, I don’t know whether he was dangerously lustful, which is surely what Katri thought, or if he was simply attracted to the woman. He isn’t nice to her, but she humiliates him time and time again. At any rate, her deep hatred of him, and some of the weight it puts on her, becomes apparent when she cleans the room above the shop in preparation for the move to Anna’s:
Katri had scrubbed the room above the storekeeper’s shop, scrubbed it with a kind of painstaking rage, the way women clean when they can’t lash out. She scrubbed away the neighbors’ shamefaced talk about envy and petty favours, she scrubbed away all the black night thoughts, and most of all she scrubbed away the doorway where the storekeeper used to loiter on some pretext, standing in hungry vigilance, waiting for some sign to tell him if he could go on hating or if there was the tiniest little handhold for his lust. The room became as clinically clean and naked as a wave-washed skerry.
Katri’s move to Anna’s happens early on. The bulk of The True Deceiver, this excellent book, deals with Katri’s insinuation into Anna’s contented solitude. The “dreadful Katri” (whom we feel for nonetheless) brings with her too much honesty, that refusal to overlook, which infects the old children’s artist: “Several neighbors passed by, but she didn’t notice their greetings, just wanted to get home, home to the dreadful Katri, to her own altered world which had grown severe but where nothing was wicked and concealed.”
Yes, you’ll need to put on a blanket when you read this book. Spring is late coming.
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