Review of Diaries of Exile from World Literature Today

Review of Diaries of Exile from Andrew Horton, World Literature Today

 

Yannis Ritsos. Diaries of Exile. Karen Emmerich & Edmund Keeley,

tr. Brooklyn, New York. Archipelago. 2013. isbn 9781935744580

 

Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990) was one of the most respected twentieth-century Greek poets, “whose writing life is entwined with the contemporary history of his homeland,” as these talented translators of his work, Karen Emmerich and Edmund Keeley, note in the introduction to Diaries of Exile. Ritsos suffered the death of his mother and older brother during his early childhood, survived hard times, including World War I, and fought in the Resistance in World War II against the Germans and as a member of the Greek Communist Party during the Greek civil war (1946–49). In 1948 he was arrested and placed in prison camps for Greek communists during the next four years, both on the island of Limnos and then the “infamous” prison island of Makronisis not far from Athens, where over twenty thousand prisoners were kept. Emmerich and Keeley have both had memorable careers as translators of modern Greek poets and as specialists in modern Greek culture, and what they offer in this deeply touching book are the “diaries” Ritsos wrote from these desolate prison islands. The translators quote Ritsos in the introduction, explaining how important it was for him to keep writing with his comment, “The only thing I always urged upon myself and my friends was (and is) as much a principle as a method, a form of therapy and salvation: work.” This impressive collection brings to an international audience the spirit of an enduring poet surviving under the harshest conditions when he seldom had a pencil or a pen and could only write a few lines a day without being punished. Look at the power and simplicity of this sample: “It’s getting dark. / Again we are easily fooled / trading two drams of hope / for five counterfeit stars.” I had the honor to meet Ritsos personally in the 1980s on the island of Samos, where he had been kept under house arrest by the Greek junta that took power in 1967. I had already by then translated and published in English several of his poems. But to meet the poet in person brought “home” to me that no prison could destroy or extinguish the spirit that Ritsos kept alive through his poetic “diaries” and through the hundreds of pebbles from the beaches of Makronisos, which he had painted over the years, that he had on display in his Samos living room. Diaries of Exile is a truly memorable book that will have both those familiar with Ritsos’s poetry, and those who are not, wishing for more.

Andrew Horton

University of Oklahoma

 

 

Angels have always eluded mankind. A Time for Everything is the tale of a sixteenth century boy by the name of Antinous Bellori and his encounters with angels. Norwegian author Karl O. Knausgaard drew upon much of the tales of angels, as he draws many connections to biblical stories such as Cain and Abel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah’s ark and many other stories and the hand that angels played in them all. For anyone entranced with the concept of angels, A Time for Everything is a fine read, expertly translated from the original Norwegian by James Anderson.

 

Humanity and the Divine: A Time for Everything

Long before the back and forth between religion and science, literature has been an irritant and a helpmate to belief. Because the continual transmission of spiritual practices relies on the transformative power of storytelling, there is a kinship between the appeal of Scripture to the catechumen’s sensibility and the grander aims of secular literature. In both instances, the success of a text may be reckoned by its potential to modulate a worldview, or bring clarity to universal concerns.

That said, at least since the time when Plato anointed itinerant versifiers with myrrh and wreathes before shooing them away from his utopia, the subversive potential of literature has been appreciated. Censors throughout the millennia have grasped that dogma is not literature’s forte. At heart, fiction and poetry are wildcards capable of shoring up a perceived truth or pillorying it, or zipping between both extremes on the fly.

In his impressively ambitious book, A Time for Everything, the Norwegian novelist Karl O. Knausgaard uses fiction’s license to advance and undermine piety. Charting the relationship between humanity and the divine, in light of the angelic manifestations in the Bible, Knausgaard adds a new coat of palpability to a selection of Biblical stories by injecting them with emotional resonances that are latent or missing from the source material. The liberties he takes are generally compelling.

In his retelling of the story of Cain and Abel, the angels figure on the periphery as sentinels posted at the entrance to the Garden of Eden. Initially, the plot canters along a psychologically pedestrian bridle path; Cain is portrayed as loner, who is forever being eclipsed by his extroverted younger brother. Then at one gruesome point, the tale shrugs off its predictability by ascribing Abel with a touch of sadism. This enriches the nuances of the brothers’ relationship exponentially.

Though a tragic outcome is never in question, Knausgaard’s creative inventions lend the story an intensity lacking in its laconic, scriptural counterpart. It should be said that sometimes these Miltonic attempts to supplement, daresay, outperform the Biblical narratives are undermined by rather hammy anachronisms–e.g. Noah’s future brother-in-law plays poker. While it could be postulated that Knausgaard lards his book with such details to display an easygoing side, he does this fine in other places (Lot and his wife are a hoot) without these garish wink-winks.

A Time for Everything prosecutes the case for divine mutability. The narrator, whose identity is explored in the coda (which one could imagine as a fully fleshed out treatment for a Lars von Trier film), is versatile at voicing this claim along literary and hermeneutical lines with fluctuating seriousness.

Donning a pleasant, scholarly tone, he engages in a close reading of the Bible that pays heed to God’s changing behavior toward mankind: The punitive deity who sends the Flood; the lamenting deity who bids Ezekiel to eat the honey-flavored scrolls; the radical deity who, by incarnating himself in the figure of Christ, quests for total empathy with his creation. For the narrator, these and other examples attest to a creator who has a finite understanding of his creation, which should not be construed as an attempt to divest God of His grandeur, but as cogent assessment of His attributes.

 

Christopher Byrd is a writer who lives in New York. His reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The American Prospect, The Believer, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Wilson Quarterly.

 

Angelic Disorder

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we just barely endure and we admire it so because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is dreadful.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies

“One can provoke considerable abuse by the truthful observation that the Western worship of divine beings is grounded in several distinct but related instances of literary representation.” — Harold Bloom, Fallen Angels

For three millennia, the vogue of depicting angels in literature has waxed and waned but has never been fully eclipsed. From their origins in Zoroastrianism in ancient Persia and the Old and New Testaments, literary representations of angels became increasingly complex, refined, and contradictory, reaching an apogee in The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, where they were enlisted in no less a project than justifying “the ways of God to men.” Angels have fallen far since. The millennium brought a host of angels in books, movies and television shows but without flaming swords, fire and brimstone, or joint-dislocating wrestling matches. Instead, the angels were mostly depicted as kindly, maternal women of a certain age eager to help those in need or bumbling middle-aged men somewhat gone to seed. Shelves of self-help books guide readers through the finer points of angelic numerology and advise them on how to be in touch with their own, personal guardian spirits. Recently angels have begun nudging vampires off the young adult bestseller lists. To do this, they are necessarily more threatening and sexually assertive than the admirably self-controlled blood-sucking Edward of Twilight. More Nephilim than putti, these angels are simple variations on familiar villains of the thriller genre. God’s dread messengers have become as domesticated as the once formidable adjective “awesome”.

There have been a few bracing antidotes to this epidemic of angelic schlock. The most recent is the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Time for Everything. Part biography of Antinous Bellori, a fictional sixteenth-century theologian and angelologist, part alternative Biblical exegesis, and part reimagining of the stories of Noah, Lot, Ezekiel, and Cain and Abel, it is a looser, baggier monster than anything Henry James might have been willing to recognize as a novel. Still, this is a work of impressive ambition and considerable, if intermittent, power.

It is a visionary exploration of the nature of the divine, of knowledge and belief and the authority of scriptures, religious and secular. And if its visions are digressive, idiosyncratic and anachronistic, they have their own internal logic and seductive intensity. The novel’s imaginative ground is a fault line between two world views, the transition in the sixteenth century from medieval thought to seventeenth-century Enlightenment, a move brought about by thinkers confident that “truth lay outside collective knowledge.” Knausgaard posits Bellori in the company of Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and Newton, members of a new intellectual species, for whom “knowledge was indissolubly linked to their individual lives, severed from the general context from which it had originally been won, with all the resultant loneliness, spiritual crisis, and megalomania.” They were not unlike hermit crabs changing shells, “quite naked and vulnerable, always alert, always on the brink of scampering back to the old shell, until they’d crossed the invisible line and the new shell lay closer.” But Antinous Bellori chose a different shell than these Enlightenment pioneers. Their writing, once daring and revolutionary, eventually hardened in familiarity. Knausgaard interrupts that epistemological dynamic, in which writing simultaneously preserves knowledge and distorts it by encapsulating it, shell-like, outside the context in which it was formed, by creating a new context for canonical works. To avoid calcification, we must constantly recover writings eclipsed by others, for “our world is only one of many possible worlds, something of which the writings of Antinous and his contemporaries serve to remind us in no small measure.” A Time for Everything is a vivid thought experiment in alternate world-views, in what would have happened had Bellori’s ideas prevailed over Newton’s. One can’t argue with gravity, of course, but what if?

The novel opens in the early 1560s. Lost in a dark wood early in his life’s journey, the eleven-year-old Antinous Bellori stumbled on two angels standing in a river. Far from the majestic luminous beings come to earth bearing God’s message in the Bible or the chubby, rosy-cheeked cherubs that crowd paintings of the Baroque and the Renaissance, these angels are almost loathsome. Trembling with hunger, they tear at the flesh of the fish they have caught, scales clinging to their chins. “Their face are white and skull-like, their eye sockets deep, cheekbones high, lips bloodless. They have long, fair hair, thin necks, slender wrists, claw-like fingers. And they’re shaking. One of them has hands that shake.” The angels’ wings glimmer green and black and their porcelain-blue eyes stare ahead fixedly, strangely independent of their movements. They examine Antinous, lying prostrate with fear, then disappear in a blaze of light. Antinous will devote the next four decades of his life to recapturing the sense of terror and joy of that sight, searching throughout Europe for traces of angelic visitation and completing his monumental treatise, On the Nature of Angels.

Bellori published this work anonymously in 1584 to avoid being tried for heresy by the Inquisition. His fundamental conclusion was more than cause enough for him to be burned at the stake. Bellori’s close study of the 189 angelic manifestations in the Bible, accounts of non-Biblical manifestations, along with “every conceivable and inconceivable text in which angels figured,” led him to question the very nature of God. “It is not the divine that is immutable and the human that is changeable,” he wrote. “The opposite is true and is the real theme of the Bible: the alteration in the divine from the creation to the death of Jesus Christ.”

Furthermore it was human understanding that had wrought the change. Bellori believed that “the worship of its immaterial aspects had distorted the divine and turned it into something else, into something abstract and written, while in reality it was corporeal and concrete, as the angels he’d seen quite clearly showed.” Soon after On the Nature of Angels was published, it was placed on the Vatican’s index of forbidden books. All but a few copies were burned. Bellori’s anonymity did not protect him for long. He was found out and interrogated. He recanted, convincingly pleaded insanity, and was released. Although he never published another word on the subject, he persisted in his quest, spending his final queers tracking the degenerate angels. Forty-three years after his first sighting, he found the angels again, considerably more decrepit, desperate, and savage, snarling at each other over a slaughtered roe deer calf. His diary breaks off abruptly after he describes this encounter, with an explanation that he must confirm a suspicion about the angels. Sometime later a body, presumed to be Bellori’s, was found, mauled beyond recognition on a remote mountainside in 1606.

At this point, the novel’s unidentified narrator, previously measured and self-effacing, becomes more intrusive and the theological speculation more extreme. From posthumous papers, he reconstructs Bellori’s second revelation, more revolutionary than the mutability of the divine. In the Cappella della Scrovegni in Padua, Bellori had seen the fresco of Christ’s Passion and was dumbstruck by Giotto’s depiction of the angels’ frenzied grief, a painterly truth that ran counter to and, for Bellori, superseded the medieval thought he had spent his life examining. The angels above the Crucifixion scene

seem to be breaking forth from the somber heavens. Their movements are violent and expressive, they fill the sky with motion and drama, I contrast to the lifeless Christ, the grieving Mary. The picture is condensed: there is redemption here, resignation, adoration, sorrow. It shows the moment when Jesus is most like us, he’s dying like a man, at the same time he’s moving away from us … presence and absence at one and the same time, God and man.

Yet the angels evince none of this resignation. They see, better than any human had then or since, the true implications of the crucifixion.

One of them closes his eyes, his mouth twisted in tears, as he clutches his face with both his hands, fingertips to his cheeks as if about to claw himself. Another is pictured in a strangely distorted posture, the upper half of his body lifted as if in ecstasy. A third opens his arms as if in embrace or surrender. … God had emptied himself into Christ and become man. And as a man he’d died. The angles alone remained, that was why they were insane with grief, and why their lives had altered so dramatically in the centuries that followed. God was dead on the cross, and the angels were imprisoned here.

Bellori had noted that after the Annunciation, no angels appear again in the Bible until Christ’s death, as if they had warily withdrawn in puzzlement awaiting God’s next move. And upon Christ’s death, the angels, God’s messengers, were stranded. They belonged neither on earth nor to heaven. This was their final fall.

The angels, caught in the gravitational pull of base, earthly desires, began to proliferate but could not leave this world. They lost more and more divine attributes, degenerating into the creatures Bellori happened upon over 400 years ago. Concerned that if humans saw the extent of their “hunger, lust, and savagery,” they would be hunted down and killed, the angels took on what they thought would be the most innocent form possible, that of “human, baby-like beings.” In the early seventeenth century, hundreds of chubby, winged, naked children spread out over Europe as reflected in the paintings of the time. At first the cherubs were greeted with joy and affection, but their undiminished hunger In the early seventeenth century, hundreds of chubby, winged, naked children spread out over Europe as reflected in the paintings of the time. At first the cherubs were greeted with joy and affection, but their undiminished hunger and greed eventually turned men against them. They had to be chased from the rafters with broomsticks. Windows had to be kept shut and larders locked against them. They were soon reduced to scavenging for food in refuse piles and back alleys. At this point their physiognomy began to change rapidly. They shrank in size, and feathers sprouted not just on their wings but all over their bodies. After a few generations of starving and squabbling, they were indistinguishable from seagulls, and the connection between these creatures and their divine ancestors slipped from collective memory.

Knausgaard’s mysterious narrator substantiates Bellori’s theories and investigations with reinterpretations of Biblical stories, expanded with faithfulness to poetic truth rather than historical accuracy. The land of Nod, where Noah prepares for the Flood, resembles a pastoral nineteenth-century Norway, with fjords. The inhabitants have guns, stoves, and kitchen sinks. They use sleds and cross-country skies. Noah’s brother-in-law tries unsuccessfully to raise mink for their fur. Cain and Abel live close enough to the Garden of Eden to see the light of the cherubim guarding it, yet in winter, they wander through snow-covered mountains. For the local harvest festival — they live in a village, not alone on the earth with Adam and Eve — they put on their best clothes: white shirts, button-fly trousers, and red suspenders. By decontextualizing these familiar stories, Knausgaard sharpens his focus on the protagonists’ inner lives, for which the Bible spares not a word.

From twelve verses in the Old Testament and an apocryphal fragment of fifteen lines that tell of Abel’s attempt to reenter the Garden of Eden and find the tree of life, the narrator spins out an encapsulated novella of 100 pages about the brothers, familiar in outline but wondrous strange in detail. Cain is taciturn, melancholy, awkward and, despite his feelings of inferiority, utterly devoted to his charismatic younger brother. He is contented with his lot as tiller of the earth, but Abel cannot resist the pull of knowledge — he eviscerates a dying shepherd in order to find the sources of his life and his pain — much less the promise of eternal life. After several attempts to sneak by the cherubim guarding the tree of life, Abel is a wreck, raving, delusional, burned over most of his body. Cain kills him not out of jealousy but to save him from a worse fate.

Knausgaard’s version of the great Flood is twice as long as his retelling of Cain and Abel. His Noah is a reclusive albino, beekeeper, and natural biologist. His father Lethem, at the summer fair, stands for hours to see the remains of a grotesque, humanoid creature with a face of surpassing beauty. Despite his revulsion, Lethem studies it carefully, knowing of Noah’s fascination with all life forms. It is one of the Nephilim, the antediluvian angels mentioned in the Old Testament, the “sons of God” who were so taken with lust for the “daughters of men” that they interbred with them bearing progeny who were neither angel nor human. Noah hears God’s word and follows his instructions to the letter. As the waters rise over the land of Nod and its inhabitants retreat to ever higher ground, Knausgaard charts their progression from denial through resignation to despair. The ark must float by these mountaintop islands within earshot of their huddled refugees, among whom is Noah’s sister, beseeching his help. These stories also provide fodder for the narrator’s theological speculation. He offers textual evidence from the Bible and from Bellori’s treatise to support his claim that God’s wrath was not caused by man’s wickedness but by the Nephilim’s miscegenation. It was they He wanted to annihilate in the Flood, not mankind.

The narrator’s identity is revealed only belatedly in a coda whose only apparent connection to the preceding 450 pages is thematic echoes. The narrator, Henrik Vankel, has exiled himself to a remote, barely inhabited Norwegian island as a result of an unspecified transgression. He slashes his chest and face with a shard of glass in a desperate attempt to achieve a sense of transcendence through pain, but he gets no existential relief. Cut off from the divine, he cannot atone for his sin.

Although Knausgaard’s faux-theological pedantry occasionally drags, he is a gripping storyteller. His eye for detail is precise and judicious, and his orchestration of interconnected themes adept. For all its dizzying layering of texts within texts, this work is itself the second section of a much larger, three-part fictional autobiography. Archipelago Books will publish the multivolume third part, Min Kamp or My Struggle, with its intentional allusion to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in the next year or two.

In his book-length essay, Fallen Angels, Harold Bloom attributes our widespread New-Ageist trend of sentimentalizing angels to “the American evasion of the reality principle, that is the necessity of dying.” Yet, this hunger for divine kitsch is more complex than a simple refusal to face reality. Americans do appear well-steeped in denial about the inevitability not just of death but also of aging. Still, Knausgaard’s suggestion that our representations of angels are both determined by and in turn influence the fluid relationship between the human and divine is more intriguing and satisfying than simple denial. On the evidence of popular and even middlebrow culture, we often call on angels, directly or indirectly through the medium of New Age angelicism, to intercede in our lives, to solve our problems, to save or cure us, to answer our prayers. A Time for Everything investigates the sources of the modern longing for belief without faith, the hunger for certainty, and the triumph of wishful thinking. And what it offers are the rigors of imagination as an equally intangible, but more substantial consolation than mere wishfulness.

The Hudson Review Volume LXIII, No. 2 Summer 2010

 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/14/primordial-struggle/

 

“The only rules I accept are the rules of grammar,” proclaims Marine, the captivating narrator of Jacques Poulin’s equally captivating short novel. Grammar aside, Marine is a person who welcomes the chaos of serendipity unconditionally. Visiting the gravesite of her mother and grandmother in a Quebec City cemetery, she is greeted by a man as he exits the nearby library. Is Marine creeped out by encountering an elderly stranger in a graveyard? Not on your life.

As it so happens, the man is Jack Waterman, a Quebec author. Since Marine had been considering translating Waterman’s novel of the Oregon Trail into English, this meeting between strangers is fortuitous, with a touch of Kismet. Waterman agrees to let Marine translate his work; he also rents her a chalet on the Ile d’Orleans, outside Quebec City.

And so begins Marine and Waterman’s complex dance as author and translator, set-in-his-ways curmudgeon and young woman adrift, two isolated souls aligning through a shared love of language. Her favorite T-shirt sports the Armand Gatti manifesto: “Mastering words is subversive and insolent.” When they shop at Value Village for clothes more suitable than their usual grubby garb to make an official appearance, Waterman quotes Ernest Hemingway’s “Wearing underwear is as formal as I ever hope to get.” Tone, style and the mot juste define their mutual creed.

Words are sacred, but neither of them ignores other kinds of messages from the universe. A cat shows up at Ile d’Orleans, abandoned, with an ominous note tucked under the collar that identifies it as Famine. Because certain occurrences, like certain sequences of words, are no accident and demand one’s full attention, Marine is compelled to resolve the mystery that note sets in motion. She enlists Waterman in her project, and they make a delightful team of amateur detectives. Sleuthing is yet another way they as artists reach out to strangers–to connect through their hearts. That they try to ease pain and suffering around them is the most important thing to them; if they should succeed, then all the better.

I won’t be the one to give away the ending. I will reveal that, alone in the chalet one evening, Marine looks up the meaning of the word refuge. She finds: “Small structure high in the mountains where climbers can spend the night.” With her signature directness, she reflects, “In my opinion that was the best definition of a novel.” Readers will find true refuge here in her touching story of friendship, hope and love.–John McFarland

Shelf Talker: A short novel that is brimming with satisfying tales of friendship, hope and love between two unlikely and enchanting characters.

 

Belgian author Claus (1929–2008) reveals in this haunting, polyglot novel (first published in the Netherlands in 1962) the deep psychological scars lingering in Flemish society following the German occupation of WWII. Over the course of a strange, disorienting weekend, protagonist Victor-Denijs de Rijckel, a divorced 37-year-old English and German teacher in Flanders, observes an intriguing woman at the local summer ball and pursues her, with the help of one of his young students, to her castle home on the coast. Once there, he and the student, Verzele, ingratiate themselves to mystery woman Alessandra and her aging parents, who turn out to be unrepentant Nazi collaborators, still glorifying the memory of Allessandra’s former lover, a local pro-German hero who vanished at war’s end. The narrative fragments that make up the account grow increasingly hallucinatory as the novel proceeds, shifting points of view and time period, and soon it becomes clear that the storyteller is reassembling the action some months later in a mental hospital. A bizarre, kaleidoscopic hide-and-seek narrative, this novel draws forth history’s phantoms with a true sense of menace. (May)

For the complete article click here.

 

Hugo Claus repeatedly probed his home country’s ambivalent relationship with its Nazi occupiers. Sam Munson reads a new translation of the Flemish novelist’s great portrait of postwar malaise.

This review appeared in The National. Click here to link to the original review page.
The modern problems of European nationalism are most often discussed in literature by reference to the barbarities of the Fascist regimes in Germany, Austria and the former constituents of its empire, and France. This is an intuitively obvious approach: the sight of an entire continent in ruins exercises a transfixing power on the human mind. The sad fact, however, is that the majority of literary attempts to address these horrors fail, looking as they do for rational meaning – in the form of Hegelian, Judeo-Christian, Marxist and other cosmos-encompassing explanations – where there is only a moral abyss.

There are, of course, exceptions – Doktor Faustus, The Man Without Qualities, the poems of Yvan Goll, Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, the essays of Jean Amery, the novels of Imre Kertész and the historical research of Raul Hilberg, among others. Most of these investigations of radical evil are well known and widely recognised as among the best writings of the 20th century. To speak today of a still largely-unknown major work on European Fascism – one as masterful as any of the above-mentioned – seems presumptuous, rather like announcing the existence of, if not a new continent, at least a land mass of strange and significant proportions. But in discussing the 1962 novel Wonder by the Flemish writer Hugo Claus, it would be churlish not to admit to an explorer’s exhilaration at discovery.

Claus was born in 1929, died only last March, and spent his adult life as a prolific artist in multiple media. Despite his early success as a painter, surrealist poet, and acute psychological novelist (and a tabloid-splashed five-year marriage to the western world’s favourite soft-core star, Sylvia Kristel), it was not until 1983 that his international reputation would begin to approach the tremendous respect he enjoyed in his native country. That year, he published the novel most critics regard as his masterwork, The Sorrow of Belgium, a postmodern bildungsroman about growing up (as Claus did) under the occupation government.

This was a fertile subject for a writer as interested as Claus was in human weakness and moral ambiguity. From the beginning of Hitler’s rise, there was plenty of enthusiasm in Belgium for the man and his policies, particularly among the Dutch-speaking Flemish majority. The Nazis took Belgium without much official resistance, and the government surrendered unconditionally after 18 days of fighting. Though King Leopold III refused to join the government in exile, he eventually capitulated to the Nazi army, and he spent the rest of the war under house arrest in his palace. The Sorrow of Belgium probes the sources of that enthusiasm and subsequent surrender through examinations of Catholic piety, family life, social stratification, ethnic nationalism, and the divided moral character that Claus saw as afflicting his homeland – all viewed through the lens of the young narrator Louis Seynaeve’s supple mind, all stamped by his insecurities and fears.

The novel placed Claus firmly in the first rank of postwar European literature and made him a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize. Asked what winning would mean to him, he replied (tellingly, in French, not his native Dutch): “The money would suit me just fine.” That insouciance in the face of calcified cultural piety, that subtle sarcasm, that bitterness — these are Claus’s hallmarks. His philosophical outrage over evil (in both its quotidian and world-historical incarnations) veers between the virtuosically articulate and the bestially dumb — a tone and temperament well-suited for discussing the political afflictions of 20th-century Europe, which united sustained intellectual assaults on the liberal order with matchless instances of raw cruelty.

The success of The Sorrow of Belgium aroused interest in Claus among English-speaking readers, the long-term result being the translation of a few (too few) of his many other books. These include The Swordfish, a dark religious parable; Desire, a novel of failed erotic pursuit; and now, thanks to a masterly, fluid translation by the eminent Michael Henry Heim, Wonder, a disturbing examination of Belgium’s relationship with Fascism that predates The Sorrow of Belgium by two decades.

Wonder is set in the postwar 1950s, and it comprises the story of a hellish two days in the life of Victor De Rijckel, a meek and sexually frustrated divorcé who leaves behind his depressing and meagre existence as a teacher of German and English in order to pursue the enigmatic Alesandra Harmedam, a striking woman he meets at a masquerade ball. Victor’s journey takes him, by bus and on foot, from the coastal town where he lives to the small inland village where Alesandra’s family reigns as the local gentry.

After infiltrating the Harmedam’s manor house, Victor discovers the existence of a cult devoted to the memory of Crabbe, a fictitious Belgian nationalist and apparatchik of the Nazi government. Mr Harmedam has converted part of his estate into an open-air statue garden devoted to Crabbe’s memory, and every year he and Alesandra organise a festival in Crabbe’s honour. The townspeople either turn a blind eye to Crabbe’s devotees or admire them, a small-scale version of the behaviour of many Belgians during the Second World War. It is among these pathetic but menacing people that Victor attempts to seduce Alesandra, with horrifying and comical consequences.

Claus’s prose matches his bizarre and masterfully-designed story well: it is both cold-eyed and infused with the unexpected. In the intellectual intensity of its physical descriptions, it has obvious antecedents in the styles of both Musil and Nabokov. Here, he describes the seaside town where Victor lives and works:

“Amid the hostile crowd with their naked thighs and peeling shoulders, their sand-covered knees, eyebrows, and hair; through their iodine-turbid gestures and voices, their hula hoops, the grandfathers in tennis shoes, the fathers in green visors, the children gleaming with oil; past one of the twelve ice-cream carts (two nuns and one fisherman licking), he made his way along the esplanade, which was yellow and composed of smooth, neatly-joined hexagons for the girls roller-skating along it. Opposite the beach and the channel of the inlet, which had been turned into a harbour by means of a breakwater that was regularly, every five or six years, destroyed by storms, stood a sandstone ship’s captain, the back of his head on a level with the houses’ second stories.”

But where Claus’s gift particularly shines in Wonder is in the risks he is willing to take with narrative structure. By far the most powerful and disconcerting of these is the deliberate erosion of the boundary between different points of view (a technique also employed in The Sorrow of Belgium): the structure of the book’s chapters varies wildly, from straightforward third-person narration of Victor’s daily life, to passages from his tormented diary, to short chapters on Belgium’s war history narrated by a clinical “We.” Even when he has taken the narrative reins, Victor cannot decide between using the pronoun “I” and referring to himself as “the teacher.” He often slips from one to the other within the space of a sentence or two. Claus presents this as a reflection of Victor’s self fragmenting in the face of the horrid truths he uncovers about his nation while chasing Alesandra: its rigid class stratification, the hidden currents of its nationalism, its love of violence.

By the novel’s end, Victor has suffered a nervous breakdown and been imprisoned in a shabby asylum, where he suffers from fantasies of persecutions at the hands of Alesandra’s conspiracy. (Claus leaves open the possibility that this paranoia is justified.) We learn that he has been writing the text we have been reading, scribbling with obstinate fury as rats clamber through the pipes above his head and dogs howl in a courtyard just out of his sight. In this, Victor serves as Claus’s proof of bourgeois society’s inability to either assimilate or fully reject Fascist politics. He is neither a Nazi nor an anti-Nazi; both positions require intellectual and spiritual commitment, which he lacks the strength to make. Instead, he comes, as Belgium did, to a tortured and unsustainable compromise with reality.

Claus sees signs of Belgium’s decay lurking everywhere — not just in Victor’s mind. One of the book’s most wrenching scenes (narrated by that cold and cynical “We”) describes the post-Liberation punishment of Alesandra’s father Richard, a prominent collaborationist. When the army truck driving him to prison is halted by a crowd, Harmedam seeks to placate them by paying obeisance to a statue commemorating Belgium’s dead in the First World War:

“Harmedam…then bowed his head and, yes, kissed the booted foot of the dying soldier of 1914-1918, at which point an old woman pushed her way through the still ungratified crowd, yes, a raging buzzard, and before anyone could stop her she pounced on her prey, lifted her flowery skirt and gave his neck two stamps of a flat-heeled shoe. Under everyone’s eyes his mouth cracked down hard on stone…we all stared at the three teeth lying on the ribbed sandstone, and a young man, a student we never saw again, gathered them up and tossed them high in the air. The younger among us lept up to catch them. And that was pretty much the end of that.”

The sorrow of Belgium, indeed. Victor’s elevation, via his literary artistry, to a witness of his fellow Belgians’ crimes does not make Wonder a novel of redemption. Though Victor survives to tell his tale, he remains locked away from society, among the insane. The old woman who stomps on Harmedam is similarly ineffectual: a collaborator with one of the most vicious political regimes in history, and all he gets is a kick in the teeth? Even the crypto-Fascists, Victor’s enemies, share this tendency towards pointless gestures: their statues, their meetings, their sinister and useless devotions. Eventually we learn that Crabbe himself, the vaunted saviour of the Flemish nation, could not stomach the extermination camps and, as a result, was sent as cannon fodder to the Eastern front by his revered German superiors.

Wonder reads like the diagnosis of a national illness, a suggestion that the Belgians were both willing collaborators and comical victims. Twenty years after its publication, Claus would revisit very similar ground in his magnum opus. But his estimation of the Belgian soul as narrow and feeble was fixed, it seems, by his early thirties, if not sooner. The novel ends with a long and harrowing confession of this all-pervading weakness, from Victor himself:

“Trouble never happens to us. We never get into trouble. We detest the unwashed, the irresponsible, the antisocial. When we see such a man coming our way we go back to our bag of frites or fresh shrimp and our thoughts about the elections, which will rightly bring the strongest, the sharpest of us to power. And then, permettez, well, then it is shocking when a man of this sort right there on the embankment, hands on hips, gazing at the shifting sea, lets out a sudden loud scream…The teacher thought, I’m going to scream. I mustn’t…He gazed out over the quivering surface and with all the strength his lungs could muster let out a scream. It went on and on.”

The only witnesses to Victor’s final, desperate, wordless attempt at expression, at truth-telling, are a middle-class woman and her disabled adult son, whom she has taken out for a good-weather ride in his wheelchair. Both of them pretend not to have heard.

Sam Munson is a regular contributor to The Review. His first novel, The November Criminals, will be published next spring by Doubleday.

 

Strange Love in the North

June 24, 2010

by Tim Parks

The remarkable novel Out Stealing Horses by the Norwegian writer Per Petterson opens with an image of titmice banging into the window of the narrator’s remote cabin home and falling dizzily into the evening snow. Warm inside, the aging Trond Sander remarks, “I don’t know what they want that I have.” This proximity to a wayward nature that expects something of us, we know not what, and where collisions and deaths are ever in the wind is a constant in Petterson’s fiction. There is a great deal of weather in his stories and it is always beautiful and menacing.

Fear is the most common emotion; life is dangerous and accidents happen. Practical competence with tools, animals, guns, and vehicles is much admired. Meticulous descriptions explain how to use a chainsaw so you won’t get hurt, how to prepare a home against the winter, how to stack logs on a sloping river bank, how to save a drowning man.

In relationships what matters is trust. If you can’t feel safe with someone, far better to be alone. Sex may be exciting, but it aligns itself with the elements as potentially catastrophic. Both Out Stealing Horses and To Siberia are essentially about betrayals of trust. In both novels a young person on the brink of adulthood loses, in melodramatic circumstances, the one relationship that made it possible to face an inclement world with confidence. Narrated in hindsight by elderly survivors, the novels hint at a crippled adult life only half-lived in constant apprehension and prolonged mourning. A quiet stoicism holds panic and despair at bay.

In Out Stealing Horses, the discovery that a near neighbor, Lars Haug, is a childhood acquaintance compels Trond Sander to recall the last summer he spent with his father fifty years before. The two had gone away to a remote cabin by a river on the Swedish border (such places are frequent in Petterson’s work) where the father enlists the boy’s help to cut down an area of forest he has bought in order to sell the timber downstream. Other helpers are Lars’s mother and father.

The fifteen-year-old Trond finds himself deeply attracted to Lars’s mother, then sees his father watching her too. Their mutual awareness of this shared attraction deepens an already close father–son relationship. It is the boy’s first sexual arousal. Then he discovers that his father and the friend’s mother are already lovers; during the war the two worked together in the anti-Nazi Resistance. When the logs have been cut and sent downriver, the father disappears and the boy realizes that the money from the log sale was intended to pay off the family—himself, his mother, and his sister—whom his father is abandoning forever. The whole summer that had seemed so idyllic was actually a carefully planned betrayal. Unfortunately, the money will amount to very little because in his eagerness to be free the father sent the logs downriver when the water was low and most have been lost in snags. Trond’s mother will never recover.

In the original Norwegian, To Siberia was published seven years before Out Stealing Horses, but the core of the book is remarkably similar. This time the narrator, unnamed, is an elderly Danish woman recalling her childhood in northern Jutland, just across the water from Sweden. The climate is extreme: “I remember it all as winter,” she tells us. Again adolescence coincides with the war period, as if growing up and conflict called to each other. This time the figure of apparent trust is the narrator’s brother, Jesper, two years older than herself.

The story’s opening sentence sets the phobic tone. “When I was a little girl of six or seven I was always scared when we passed the lions on our way out of town.” They are only stone lions on gateposts but when, riding past in their grandfather’s pony-trap, Jesper shouts “They’re coming! They’re coming!,” the girl panics, leaps from the trap, and flees into the fields. Her body pays the price; her knees are grazed and “there was dew on the grass and my ankles were wet, I felt stubble and stalks and rough ground under my bare feet.” But when her grandfather scolds Jesper, the frightened girl comes to his defense. “My grandfather was a man full of wrath and in the end I always had to stand up for my brother, for there was no way I could live without him.”

Escalating and intensifying, similar episodes repeat themselves throughout the book. The children’s parents are unhappy and distracted. The mother is religious and prudish, absorbed in her hymns, prayers, and fear of moral scandal. A skilled carpenter, the father is an incompetent businessman who can’t get his customers to pay, and so fills his children’s lives with small chores to make ends meet.

Inadequately protected and only intermittently loved, girl and boy venture into the world together. Or rather, the daredevil, Communist Jesper knocks on his sister’s window in the night and drags her off on his explorations, of the frozen coast, of the town’s drink-fueled nightlife. Invited to witness her brother’s daring as he walks out to sea on the ice or throws himself into a brawl in a bar, the girl is determined to overcome fear and get involved. Since she is always inadequately clothed, we are constantly made aware of the cold on her body, icy air on thighs and stomach, salt wind gluing her hair to her face, seawater chafing her thighs. “Don’t be scared, just do what I do,” Jesper tells her. But the boy is careless. He slips from a seawall and his panicking sister has to save him from drowning.

The girl finds two forms of relief from excitement and vulnerability: precious moments when she feels warmed and at one with nature, as when she stretches out to sleep beside a cow in a stall (again there is a similar scene in Out Stealing Horses). Such experiences offer the promise of an ultimate extinction of the anxious ego in an all-embracing Other. But they are rare. An easier refuge is reading: the girl borrows novels from a rich friend, taking pleasure in fictional vicissitudes in the safety of her room. Through books the children discover the lands they dream of visiting. Jesper yearns to go to exotic Morocco: caravans, Moors, outlandish clothes; the girl is drawn to Siberia, not so much for the arduous landscape and climate but for the warm houses and thick clothes the Siberians have to protect themselves. Then the rich friend dies and her family library is no longer available.

Given his narrators’ constant efforts to foresee and forestall, it’s not surprising that Petterson is an extremely careful writer and his books are meticulously constructed, full of parallelisms that sometimes border on contrivance. So the second of To Siberia‘s three sections begins, like the first, with someone shouting, “They’re coming! They’re coming!” This time it is not the stone lions but the Germans. From now on Jesper’s adventures will be in the Resistance and his sister will be called on to take greater and greater risks to help and protect him. She is now fifteen and the attention to her frequently cold, tired, wounded body becomes sexually charged.

This section reaches its climax when a Gestapo man comes to arrest Jesper and the girl keeps him talking to cover for her brother who has just left. Sneeringly, the Nazi accuses her of sleeping with Jesper—they are known to be very close—and with a courage born from offense she slaps him and gets herself seriously beaten. Arriving that evening at her brother’s beach hideout to warn him of the danger, she is soaked through and has to strip naked. Jesper says:

 

“You’re a good looker now, Sistermine.”

“Gestapo Jørgensen says we sleep together.”

I swallow, there is something in my throat I can’t get down…. Jesper just smiles.

“But we don’t, do we.”

“No,” I say, and it is then he sees the wound on my face…. He gets up.

“Did Jørgensen do that?”

I do not reply. He takes the few steps toward me slightly bent under the roof, I swallow and drop the jumper.

“Hell, the swine,” says Jesper and raises his hand to touch the wound with his fingertips carefully. I lean my cheek against his palm, lightly at first and then harder and we stand there and he leans his forehead against my temple, his shirt just brushes my bare breasts. I meet him, I do not breathe, and he says:

“You’re freezing.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a sweet brave sister.”

“Yes,” I say.

He bends down carefully with my cheek in his hand and picks up the sweater.

“You’re freezing,” he says.

 

“Sistermine” is the only name given to the narrator throughout: if incest is avoided, nevertheless her brother possesses her. But he will not protect her; immediately after this scene Jesper flees to Sweden, leaving his sister to warm her young body with one of the fishermen who helped him escape. “It gave me no pleasure,” she tells us.

Petterson doesn’t so much develop fully drawn characters as establish a pattern of complementary ways of behaving, in which everybody is seen in relation to the narrator’s anxieties and aspirations. In this regard, the most interesting part of the novel is the third and last, where the girl tries to come to terms with adult life without her brother as reference point.

The war is over. In character, Jesper has gone where he dreamed of going: Morocco. He doesn’t write, isn’t in a hurry to get back to his sister. The girl hasn’t made it to Siberia but is working aimlessly in a great-aunt’s diner in Oslo, drifting from one unsatisfactory sexual encounter to another. Once again she loses a source of free books after a lesbian librarian attempts to seduce her and she feels too threatened to return.

Romantic love at last seems possible when a mild-mannered amateur boxer (a protector?) courts her assiduously. Finally she agrees to follow him to the inevitable remote cabin. Snow falls heavily. Our girl is freezing again, but her man is competent at lighting stoves. A good sign. In the growing heat, she avoids seduction by removing her clothes before he can kiss her. When the two make love, the reader may hope for a happy ending, but in the early morning she rises quietly and leaves her sleeping man, repeating the abandonment that has been perpetrated against her. She cannot trust anyone after losing her brother, and Jesper now compounds his betrayal by carelessly contracting an illness in Morocco and dying. The girl is left in a desolate Siberia of the mind, searching for a warm place to bear the child she is carrying.

Much of Petterson’s worldwide success with Out Stealing Horses depends on two qualities: a deceptively simple, wonderfully incantatory style in which small units of well-observed detail and action, connected only by a string of “and”s, accumulate in long rhythmic sentences that frequently give us the impression that the next detail will be very bad news. We are kept spellbound and anxious. Petterson is also careful to avoid making demands on readers with references to cultural setting; the only things you need to know about Norway and Denmark to enjoy these books is that they are in northern climes and were invaded by the Germans in World War II. Nor will you know more than that on finishing the novels. To turn from Petterson to the late Hugo Claus, then, is to see how equally fine and perhaps more ambitious writing can have very little commercial success internationally when it takes the opposite tack: Wonder is a work of savage satire intensely engaged with the moral and cultural life of the author’s Belgium and making no concessions to those who are unwilling to interest themselves in the small country’s contentious politics.

The problem is not only one of content, but of style and perhaps above all translation. Where Anne Born has been able to render Petterson’s Norwegian in a syntactically simple, hypnotically fluent English, Michael Henry Heim is occasionally and understandably in difficulty with Claus’s more knotty and rhetorical Belgian Dutch packed with asides, allusions, and fierce juxtapositions, a style created to evoke a world sliding into chaos where contrasts and contradictions are so grotesque that we can only “wonder.”

The plot is bizarre. Some years after the war in the coastal town of Ostend, a high school teacher, Victor De Rijckel, is requested to introduce a speech his egregious headmaster is delivering that evening at a cultural association. Drinking heavily, the teacher goes instead to a masked ball where, sprawled in an alcove, he witnesses a beautiful woman reneging on her promise to sleep with a man because she has discovered that beneath his mask he is Jewish. Joining him to follow the woman, who has left her fur jacket behind, De Rijckel sees her stumbling over stones at the seafront as if planning to drown herself.

The following morning, the teacher catches a pupil writing ALESSANDRA on the school wall—the name, it turns out, of the woman at the ball. Surprisingly well informed, the boy invites the teacher to go with him (by bus) to the village where Alessandra lives in a castle. On impulse De Rijckel agrees, only to discover on arrival that the castle will be the site of a conference in honor of Alessandra’s hero and perhaps ex-lover, Crabbe, a mysterious wartime leader (missing and presumed dead) of a fanatic movement for Flemish nationalism that collaborated with the Nazis in return for domination of Belgium at the expense of the Francophile minority. Mistaken for one of the conference delegates, De Rijckel is invited to give a talk on Crabbe’s place in Flemish history.

In Claus’s world, all notions of trust and indeed propriety were lost long ago. Relationships are mere proximities agitated by desire or aversion; any scruples are fleeting and inconsequential. De Rijckel, we hear, had previously seduced or was seduced by a sixteen-year-old pupil, married her when she fell pregnant, and was abandoned by her when she grew bored. He has no idea what the schoolboy’s motives are in taking him to the castle. Accused of pedophilia by the local innkeeper, he seems unconcerned. When he meets Alessandra and has sex with her he loses interest, then claims to be Jewish to upset her.

In particular, the reader can’t trust the narrator. The confidently omniscient third person with which the novel opens shifts unexpectedly to the first person, then back again. De Rijckel, we discover, is under observation in some kind of detention center, perhaps a mental hospital, where he has been ordered to record his story; however, he is also writing a more private version in a secret notebook and an ongoing diary in yet another. Moving unannounced from one notebook to another, the novel leaps backward and forward apparently at random, occasionally telling the same scene in quite different ways.

This method of narration is echoed in a monument to Crabbe outside the castle that consists not of one statue but of two zigzag rows of fourteen statues, all of the same man but in different styles and materials, “as if their maker had decided that the way to achieve a definitive likeness…was to use the most varied forms and approaches.” One has an amorphous head with “an unremitting Neanderthal quality,” one seems like a Greek god, one a goblin “tottering on one leg.” Another “is a neoclassical statue made for a city park and pigeons.” Another again uses every kind of waste and organic material “to fashion a likeness, though forever failing…because an overabundance of factors derails the search whenever one attempts to evoke a definitive image of someone, especially if that someone is the unchained Crabbe, that is, the unbound I.” Approaching the statues, De Rijckel suddenly finds himself possessed by the spirit of Crabbe, who briefly takes over the narrative. Elsewhere masks, disguises, and cases of mistaken identity abound.

Shortly before disappearing, Crabbe, we discover, had lost his belief in Flemish and Nazi supremacy as a result of witnessing an atrocity:

 

…He happened upon a camp in Poland and a wooden pavilion that had been put up in two days by a special contingent of carpenters from the Organisation Todt when a visit by a Red Cross inspection team had been announced…a fun fair, a merry-go-round with horses for Jewish children.

 

But everything about the camp was fake “because the children would spend only one day there, the day the Red Cross passed through for the inspection.” Crabbe visits the camp again some days later “when the children were all piled up in rows. Wearing nothing but underclothes, naked blue thighs protruding, pushed into one another in a hook like pattern.” At this point

 

Crabbe was poisoned by the dregs of original sin, because in the end it was compassion, something nobody needs, that brought him low…. He had reached the point, the decisive point, where you know, you simply know. The point where you can’t put anything into words…so you say nothing at all. You disappear.

 

It is as if, behind all the clamor and contradiction of Claus’s all-too-recognizable modern world, the one absolute certainty remains the horror of the Holocaust.

Originally published in 1962, Wonder is a reminder of the energy and experimental verve with which so many writers of the Fifties and Sixties (Malaparte, Bernhard, Grass, Böll, Burgess, Pynchon) conjured up the disjointed and rapidly complicating world they found themselves in. In sharp contrast, the Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker’s first novel, The Twin, shares with Per Petterson’s work an evident distaste for all things loud and contemporary, as if the chaotic public environment were now considered beyond indignation or even description and the writer had wisely fallen back on the patient construction of intimate narratives in rural outposts.

Quietness is not the only similarity. Like Petterson, Bakker gives us an aging and fearful narrator contemplating a life ruined on the brink of adulthood by betrayal and death. That said, the Dutch writer’s tone is tougher and wryer than the Norwegian’s; nor does he rely on melodrama and menace to keep up our interest.

On a small damp farm in northern Holland, after thirty years of tending cows and sheep against his will, Helmer Van Wonderen decides to take control of his life. He moves his bedridden father from a controlling position downstairs to an upstairs room where he will be unseen and unheard. Since his mother has recently died, Helmer is now free to clear out all the downstairs furnishings, redecorate, and establish himself in the room his parents previously occupied. He decides to take his father as little food as possible:

 

I carried him upstairs and now he can go and perch on the roof as far as I’m concerned, and then, from there, he can carry on to the tops of the poplars that line the yard so that he can blow away on a gust of wind, into the sky. That would be best, if he just disappeared.

 

Cruel as they may seem, these steps are not enough to appease Helmer’s anger, nor do they free him from unwanted routines. Originally, it was his twin brother Henk who was to follow their father’s footsteps as a farmer. Throughout their childhood, Henk and Helmer had been blissfully happy in each other’s company, sleeping in the same bed, content to be “two boys with one body.” Yet they differed in character. More talkative and practical, Henk “knew exactly what he wanted,” to run the family farm. Less sure of himself, Helmer attracted his father’s contempt by choosing to study literature in Amsterdam.

Then the betrayal. At nineteen, Henk falls in love with the beautiful Riet and will no longer share a bed with his twin. Helmer is jealous, but of Riet, not Henk; it’s his brother’s body he yearns for. Just when the young couple seem set to marry, Riet drives her car into a canal and Henk is drowned. Harshly, the father tells Riet never to show her face on the farm again and Helmer is ordered to give up his studies and get to work with the cows. All his life he will be made to feel inferior to his dead twin. All his life, the chairs around the kitchen table will recall who sat where, what kind of glances were exchanged. Even redecorated, the house is all past and no future.

The charm of Bakker’s book is how finely every element is balanced, how perfectly the story is paced. Helmer is aware that his misdirected life is largely his own fault. He could have disobeyed his father, but “always just let things happen.” His “outrageously ugly” mother, with whom he shared an unspoken complicity against the father, was also “outrageously kind-hearted,” but didn’t speak up for him and, even if she had, he would not have taken advantage of it. This fatal lack of purposefulness is also Helmer’s appeal and gives him a deep affinity with the animals who have made his life a prison:

 

Half my life I haven’t thought about a thing. I’ve milked the cows, day after day. In a way I curse them, the cows, but they’re also warm and serene when you lean your forehead on their flanks to attach the teat cups. There is nothing as calming, as protected, as a shed full of sedately breathing cows on a winter’s evening. Day in, day out, summer, autumn, winter, spring.

 

Helmer has acted against his father’s will only once, purchasing two donkeys that have no economic function on the farm. Constantly in each other’s company, intensely attractive to the children from the next farm, and objects of Helmer’s fond contemplation, the donkeys evoke something of the twins’ childhood innocence, though Bakker is not so crude as to make this overt. While beauty, in Petterson’s writing, is always accompanied by menace, here the joy of the donkeys has to do with their harmlessness and superfluousness, their not being integrated in anyone’s plans.

A hooded crow arrives on the farm and takes up residence in the ash tree outside the father’s window. After a silence of almost forty years, Riet writes, saying she would like to visit if old Mr. Van Wonderen is dead. Helmer says he is. The reader imagines a late flowering of love hampered by the embarrassment of the decrepit father. Instead Riet persuades Helmer to accept her problem son as a farmhand. In his late teens, the boy is called Henk.

Bakker shows a fine gift for laconic comedy here as Helmer is forced to take on a role of command while the boy with the emotionally charged name lazily smokes in bed, asks for wine, television, and money, and criticizes Helmer for his cruelty to his father. Finally, sensing the older man’s latent homosexuality, Henk will slip into Helmer’s bed. But again Bakker adroitly slides away from the conclusion he seemed so carefully to have set up. It is as if action were constantly hinted at, but only to remind us how much more attractive contemplation is.

Indeed the great pleasure of this novel is how it has just enough plot to allow us to relish its beautifully turned observations of birds and beasts, weather and water. Helmer’s capacity to respond to the natural world and enjoy small practical tasks takes the edge off the story’s sadness, redeeming the life he thinks of as wasted. “I have a beautiful small handsaw that is exceptionally well suited to pollarding willows,” one paragraph begins, and Bakker makes sure we savor Helmer’s account of the pollarding, however superfluous it may seem to the book’s plot.

As for the thorny problem of imagining a plausible and attractively different future for oneself, that is a different matter. Rather than embracing Henk’s body, Helmer starts smoking his cigarettes, because, he decides: “Smoking is a pensive activity.”

 

Let’s begin with a simple declaration: Attila Bartis is a great writer. That his prose, like a slow, centripetal whirlwind, involves one in a dark world monstered with dreadfully fascinating people fumbling at all the big questions and ending up being devoured by them, will be evident to anyone who takes up his new novel, Tranquility.
Bartis, a Romanian-born Hungarian, at times puts one in mind of Joyce, at others of Kafka, at others of Roth, yet ultimately eludes all comparison by the strength of his originality. He tells the story of Andor Weér, a brilliant writer forced by the twin demons of duty and guilt to live with and care for his deranged, recluse mother.

His mother is made culpable for her violinist daughter’s defection from the communist regime and loses her position as an actress in the national theater. To make amends for her daughter’s refusal to return to Hungary, she orders a coffin made, puts all her daughter’s effects inside, has it interred in a cemetery, and mails death notices to sundry commissars and comrades so and so…all to no avail. So she shuts herself in her apartment with her young son and refuses to leave for any reason, effectively imprisoning both herself and Andor. His many attempts at escape over the ensuing years, both physical and emotional, are what propel the plot of the novel.

Since the foundation of Stoic physics, numerous natural philosophers have argued that the universe is a plenum, that there is no such thing as empty space, that all beings are held in a thick unseen aspic that makes the infinite flow of cause and effect possible.
At times it would seem that all that the characters in Tranquility need do is to cross a spleenful of verbs, to have angry sex with one another, to share a bottle of slivovitz in grudging peace, or to love each other in order to drive each other mad, as though madness were like small pox, a disease spread through some mysterious medium of contagion.

And like a virulent illness, Attila Bartis’s novel will be hard for any reader to recover from. (September 2008)

 

–Arturo Mantecón