HEINRICH HEINE’S “TRAVEL PICTURES”

THE PORTRAIT BEHIND THEM | August 15th 2008

Heinrich Heine was a great poet. Yes, but a marvelous prose writer too, writes James Guida, and a biting humorist way ahead of his time …

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) wanted to have his cake and eat it too. In his writing he succeeded on this point, and mostly splendidly. He was hugely knowing and not a little naive; an eccentric who had lucid and prophetic insights about his time; an ardent defender of liberal causes yet an anarchic humorist who laughed at most things under the sun. Before his mid-20s he emerged, virtually fully-formed, as one of Germany’s leading poets. Only a few years later, he was one of Europe’s liveliest prose writers. Baudelaire saw a kindred spirit, praising him as a writer who “would be a genius if only he turned himself more often to the divine.” George Eliot, adamant that he was a genius, asserted that Heine did more for German prose than Goethe.

His place in the German literary canon is evident. Indeed his songs were set to music by the likes of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Strauss. But his position in the English-speaking world remains somewhat obscure. Here Heine is known more for his poetry than his prose, which tends to be relegated to semi-academic editions of his selected writings. This is a shame, but all the more reason why we should be grateful for a new layman’s edition of Heine’s witty “Travel Pictures”, translated by Peter Wortsman. It’s a work that remains strikingly fresh in style and tone.

“Travel Pictures” consists of four sketches based on trips he took, between 1826 and 1831, to Germany’s Harz region, the Italian town of Lucca and the island of Nordeney in the North Sea. But this is not a travel book in any straightforward sense, and there aren’t any pictures in it. Classifying it as a work of nonfiction is hard enough–everything is so clearly coloured by Heine’s will or whim. Discerning the difference between truth and fiction may be beside the point.

It is tempting to say that the poet himself is the subject of the work, but that won’t take you far. Heine moulds his autobiography into fairy-tale forms that suit his purpose. The moment you think you have a clear image of him, the diamonds in his kaleidoscope fall into yet another arrangement. When Heine talks of himself he is in fact talking about everything else, and the opposite is also true. Eliot, in her essay about him, was on the mark when she suggested that a certain stripe of modern humorist is essentially a prose poet.

But the book’s title is accurate for the way Heine draws picture after picture–sketches, literary cartoons, cameos. In ‘The Harz Journey’, he dreams himself chatting to the ghost of a late professor from Gottingen. A rigid rationalist in life, the professor’s spirit lectures on in death, insisting that there are no such things as ghosts. In ‘The City of Lucca’ Heine converses with a sage old lizard, who tells him that “Nothing in this world wants to go backwards.” The reptile grows jealous upon learning of the fame of Schelling and Hegel, and declares that no human truly has thoughts. The lizard condemns the efforts of philosophers, describing the fruits of their labours as mere passing fancies. The highest wisdom, the sage says, is printed on his very own tail, which Heine describes as having “the most wondrous characters displayed in brilliantly coloured significance all the way to the tip”–a sort of emblem of the artist’s ideal.

A portrait emerges from these pictures, but it is still worth inquiring into the man behind the page. Heine’s slippery humour secretes allusions left and right. It is hard to get a grip on it all without some context, which perhaps helps to
explain the neglect of his prose in English. Heine was an outsider in more ways than one: a German living in France, a lyrical poet interloping in satirical prose. He loved art, but held that the age of ‘pure art’ was over; delighted in nature, yet scorned the fashion for rhapsodising about it; championed liberation, but still jokingly thanked God “that one lay quietly in bed, sipping excellent coffee, with one’s head still comfortably attached to one’s shoulders.” He was a Jew who converted to Protestantism, having succumbed to the anti-Semitism of the age. But this was a choice he lived to regret. He read the Bible throughout his life, comparing Judaism with Protestantism and Catholicism. He admired aspects of them all, and poked fun at all of them too.

It is well known that laughter can mask tears, but Heine’s wild humour is sometimes still steamy with their evaporation. Despite his easy literary success, his writing makes plain that his life was ill-starred. He often laments the torn quality of modern life, its burden of self-consciousness, and so on. But it is unlikely he would have fared better in another age. Heine’s irony is unique for the very personal current of melancholic sincerity running through it.

Perhaps to counter-act this gloom, the poet strove to unearth the endearing qualities of unworldliness. Few writers have so winningly sung the value of innocent foolishness. Here he is in joyful argument in “Travel Pictures”, attaining lift-off with the help of exclamation marks: “The cool-headed and savvy philosophers! How they look down with a sympathetic smile on the self-inflicted torments and mad escapades of a poor Don Quixote, and, in all their pedantry, fail to notice that such Donquixotery is still the most precious part of life, indeed the essence of life itself, and that this Donquixotery emboldens the whole world and all that’s philosophised, fiddled, yielded and yawned upon it to evermore daring flights of fancy!” All of Heine’s writing is a kind of rebuttal to the literalist school-teacher spirit, and also to complacent common-sense. A flight of fancy is still flight, he seems to be saying. Intelligence turned inside-out might even yield a finer form of wisdom.

Strengths and weaknesses were conspicuously mixed in Heine, and one senses that this, together with his talent for provoking people, is why he drew critics easily. His promise to the folks of Gottingen, delivered in a prefatory poem to ‘The Harz Journey’, is to go up into the mountains and, “laughing, look down upon you all”–the threat of a sulky child, to be sure. A quarter of ‘The Baths of Lucca’ in “Travel Pictures” is famously devoted to sustaining a nasty feud with a fellow poet. Heine taunted Count von Platen in an earlier piece by quoting a friend’s couplet that mocks him. Heine usually spreads his malice with a carefree brush and gets away with it, probably even getting his own victims to smile; here, though, he digs his claws in, going in for embarrassing, insecure over-kill. But this is hardly reason enough for dismissing the poet as “hard of heart”, as a critic in the New York Times did recently. The passages are evidence of the personal shortcomings even Heine’s most enthusiastic admirers didn’t deny, but with von Platen conveniently out of sight, some of the ad hominem can now settle into general invective, and embedded in the rant are some brilliant reflections on the nature of art and poetry.

The best side of Heine’s humour, and the best introduction to the prose, still lies in ‘The Harz Journey’. Heine was young all his life, and only 33 when he wrote the last of these sketches, but this first frolic captures the youth at his most sunny and spirited. He spends the piece talking nonsense to pretty girls and comparing university academics to livestock (unfavourably). He hikes to the town of Klaustal, where he descends into two mines. Mindful of their perilous lives, he’s charmed by the miners, and stays up late into the night listening to their stories. The experience leads him to consider the relationship between a quiet contemplative life and the imaginatively charged world of fairy-tales. He then writes some touching passages on time, memory, childhood and the sacrifices of adulthood:

“Now we are grown up, noble folk … Even our clothes remain strange to us, and we hardly know how many buttons are attached to the jacket we are wearing this very minute… Why, we can hardly still remember what that brown waistcoat looked like, the one that used to draw so much laughter and on whose broad stripes the dear hand of an old flame so sweetly lay!

“[Childhood] is so unlike adulthood, when we become more intentional, dwelling on the particular, having cashed in the clear gold of contemplation for the paper money of dictionary definitions, gaining in life experience what we lose in the deep lustre of looking.”

Heine was sometimes criticised for his supposed hedonism and open admiration of pagan views. But he saw in the ancients an adult version of the frank candour of childhood. He argued that their greatness consisted “not as our aestheticists maintain, in an eternal quietude without passion, but rather in an eternal passion without disquiet.”

Half-blind, suffering from semi-paralysis in his long last years, Heine presumably knew about all kinds of disquiet. This didn’t stop him from flying like a darting sparrow between youth and maturity, personal delight and political indignation. He is commonly criticised for being an essentially negative writer who is not for anything. But the truth is that he was, in his singular way, for everything. Like a child, he didn’t want to have to choose. At his best, he found some wonderful ways not to.

Touring With an Eccentric Guide
By MICHAEL DIRDA
June 14, 2008; Page W11

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) once described himself as the last of the romantics and the first of the moderns, which may account for the winning combination of the playful and the serious in his writing. Today he is largely remembered for his ballad-like poetry, much of it set to music by Schubert, Wolf and other lieder composers. In his own day, however, this author of such verse masterpieces as “Die Lorelei” — about the siren who lures Rhine boatmen to their doom — was equally celebrated as a prose writer, spending much of his adult life in Paris as a journalist, explaining the French to the Germans and the Germans to the French.

Among Heine’s most charming prose offerings is “Travel Pictures,” a series of eccentric travel memoirs now published in a beautiful new edition. The first, “The Harz Journey,” appeared in 1826 and begins this way: “Famous for its sausages and university, the City of Gottingen belongs to the King of Hanover and has 999 hearths, various churches, a maternity hospital, an observatory, a students’ lock-up, a library and a Ratskeller in which the beer is very good.”

From this high-spirited opening Heine quickly goes on to out-and-out comedy. Readers needing actual information about Gottingen, he tells us, would do better to consult “the well-indexed topography of the place compiled by K.F.H. Marx.” Not that this K.F.H. Marx is wholly reliable: “I must take exception to his failure to forcefully contradict the belief that Gottingen girls have overly large feet.” Overly. Large. Feet. “I have, in fact, for quite some time now, been engaged in the preparation of a serious refutation of this misguided view . . . and have spent hours on the Weenderstrasses studying the feet of passing damsels.”

At this point Heine is just hitting his stride: “And in my learned treatise I plan to expound upon the results of my studies under the following rubrics: 1) concerning feet in general, 2) concerning the feet of the ancients, 3) concerning the feet of elephants, 4) concerning the feet of Gottingen girls, 5) a summation of all that has already been said concerning these feet at Ulrich’s Beer Garden, 6) a consideration of said feet in their anatomical context, whereby I will take the opportunity to extend the consideration to calves, knees, etc., and finally 7) if I can dig up large enough sheets, I will include, as an addendum, several engraved facsimiles of the feet of the ladies in question.”

Obviously, “Travel Pictures” isn’t your typical Baedeker or Guide Michelin. At times “The Harz Journey” — in which Heine flees Gottingen to go tramping in the mountains — sounds as if it might have been written by Bill Bryson or even the great Irish comic genius Flann O’Brien. Two other memoirs in “Travel Pictures” — both from Tuscany, “The Baths of Lucca” and “The City of Lucca” — feature the magnificent Marquis Christoforo Gumpalino (formerly the German-Jewish banker Lazarus Gumpel) and can be as hilarious as a Marx Brothers film. Imagine this scene, set at a slightly rundown salon, with Groucho, Margaret Dumont and Harpo: “While the Marquis calculated the expenses of this journey on his fingers, he hummed to himself [the aria] ‘Di tanti palpiti.’ The Signora interspersed this rendition with piercing trills, and the Professor feverishly strummed his guitar.”

Amid all this hubbub, a gorgeous young courtesan enters, flings herself onto a couch face downward and proceeds to perform a puppet show with her two upraised feet — one foot clad in a red sock, the other in blue — miming her love for a young man who has become a priest. On yet another evening when Heine was in attendance the infatuated Marquis is finally invited by the seemingly unattainable Lady Maxwell “to drink the goblet that is love down to the very last drop.” Unfortunately, the Marquis has himself accidentally just drunk down — to the very last drop — a very powerful laxative.

But “Travel Pictures” isn’t merely zany. It’s an ever-surprising grab bag of dialogues and mini-essays on subjects as various as our “vast joyless modernity,” German fairy tales, the nature of love and the love of nature, the differing advantages (and disadvantages) of Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. It contains bits of poetry, attacks on Heine’s enemies, reflections on Goethe and “Don Quixote,” and even a paean to Napoleon.

Throughout, in Peter Wortsman’s translation, one also notices the dexterously elegant rhythm of the prose and the quiet, lovely similes: “lithe with sin,” “as clean as a glass of water.” Heine can even suggest entire novels in a phrase: “A contented page who enjoys the clandestine favors of a princess . . . would surely not brag about it in the market-place.” And some sentences are almost parables: “The lizards told me that there was a legend among the stones that God would one day turn to stone to save them from their stiffness.” When a ghost appears to a terrified Heine, it proceeds to mount a logical argument proving the impossibility of ghosts.

Matthew Arnold, in a notable essay, stressed Heine’s “wonderful clearness, lightness, and freedom.” Throughout his life, though, this witty man of letters was utterly serious about defending civil liberties and religious freedom, counting among his friends not only artists like Balzac and Berlioz but also revolutionaries like Karl Marx. In one of his plays Heine, who was Jewish, presciently observed that “where they begin by burning books, they will end by burning people.”

Sadly, this brilliant writer’s last eight years were spent bedridden, in excruciating pain on his “mattress-grave,” a victim of spinal degeneration. Just before dying, he supposedly remarked: “Of course, God will forgive me. That’s his job.”

Mr. Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays.

 

“Once the world was whole, in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Heinrich Heine wrote. “There was still a unity in the world and there were complete poets. We rightfully honor these poets and take pleasure in their poetry; but any aping of their wholeness is a lie.”

The German Heine (1797-1856), one of the greatest of the Romantics, bears only a partial resemblance to our image of them; a Keats, say, or a Shelley. True, there are his short lyric poems, in which emotion is so compressed under heat as to turn them crystalline, like diamonds tormented out of coal. But there is also a searing current of scorn and revulsion.

He is a “torn poet,” as he puts it; in no way a whole one. Byron comes the closest, perhaps, but compared to the scouring, witty Heine who laughs not until it hurts but because it hurts, Byron was a veritable lamb.

It is Heine’s torn condition, his allergy to beauty in capital letters while producing so much of it, that led critics to catapult him from the first half of the 1800s to the threshold of modernism, more than half a century later.

“Torn” describes the four episodes of “Travel Pictures,” just issued by Archipelago Press in a new, sometimes awkward translation by Peter Wortsman. Except for the best known of them, “The Harz Journey,” what little travel is done is largely around himself.

“There’s nothing more boring on this earth,” Heine writes in one piece, “than to have to read the description of an Italian journey, except maybe to have to write one — and the writer can only make it halfway bearable by speaking as little as possible of Italy itself.”

Frenetic digression is the mode, as if Heine were not simply exploring his feelings but goading them, the way one might jab at a wound as if to say: “You torment me? Very well, then I torment you.”

Darkness surrounds the wit, lightning flashes of sheer intelligence transform the darkness, and, it must be said, great windy stretches of self-indulging discourse blow throughout. One of these interminably mocks a minor poet, August von Platen, not so much as a homosexual but as a limp one, lacking the gusto of such classic poets as Petronius.

Heine was a perpetual flood, at his worst — at least for today’s reader — when unchecked, at his shivering best when dammed. Thus the splendor of his brief poems and, in these pieces, the moments where he rouses from rhetorical swoon to fix his incomparable glittering eye on the particular.

“Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the least means,” he declares, and it defines his own deceptively simple lyrics, with iron grief at their core. He could be censuring his own windy passages when he writes that von Platen was no true poet because “language never became his internal master, but he became a master of language, or rather he imposed his mastery like a virtuoso on an instrument.” A thunderous distinction to this day.

He writes of Milady, an aging love, spirited, witty and cast down only by a glimpse into the mirror. “I am still beautiful!” she retorts. He writes of Francesca, a dancing Italian courtesan who allows him all manner of liberties, but alas, coming from Mass, “her step was dark and Catholic … and just as in former nights her legs were lithe with sin, so were they now heavy with religion.”

Religion captivates him even as he, torn, rejects it. Jewish, a Protestant convert out of convenience, he has a Sancho Panza-like Jewish manservant dissect the different faiths.

Catholicism: “I see no pleasure in a religion in which our dear God, God help us, is dead, and it smells of incense just like at a funeral.” Protestantism: “A harmless religion, as clean as a glass of water, but it doesn’t do you any good either.” Judaism: “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Gives you nothing but scorn and shame. I tell you, it’s no religion at all, just a lot of hard luck.”

Heine refers here only once, bitingly, to German anti-Semitism. Pointing out a hunting area, he concedes the sport’s pleasure for some. “My ancestors, however, did not belong to the hunters, but rather to the hunted.”

His feelings towards Germany itself are more complex (political reaction caused him to immigrate to France). Seeing a line of emperors’ statues, he wonders why one brandishes a sword. “It must surely have some significance, since the Germans have the curious custom of always attaching a thought to whatever they do.”

Watching a military parade in Italy, he remarks that the commands are given in German. “Do we hold such sway in the world that German has even become the language of commandment? Or are we ourselves so accustomed to being commanded that German has become the dialect of obedience?”

But Germany was part of him, its landscapes and above all its language. One of his most bitterly moving poems speaks of the beautiful country he once had, where violets and the oak tree grew. “A dream said to me in German (how wonderfully it sounded): ‘I love you.’ It was a dream.”

After his death, a statue of Heine was offered to Düsseldorf. Nationalist sentiment caused it to be rejected. German-Americans then donated it to New York to be placed by Central Park. It was pronounced aesthetically inferior (this has always been a hard place to crack the art scene), and it stands now in the Bronx.

 

Picture a rundown, rain-soaked Parisian café called Le Cercle. It’s the kind of place people “come in to get out of the weather, they have a drink, and they go on their way.” The glasses are thickly cut and the ashtrays display the names of French aperitifs. The owner smokes a cigarillo in the morning and worries about his health.

 

“That week he was scowling more or less full time,” says Pierre, the 54-year-old veteran bar-tender who narrates this world to life. Step into it and you pretty much know this restaurant is about to unravel.

 

It’s not a dramatic unraveling, but a sad, slow leave-taking that forms the wounded heart of Dominique Fabre’s beguiling little novel, which is elegantly translated by Jordan Stump.

 

If Barry Levinson’s “Diner” could be said to have a French literary equivalent, this might be it. Here is the world of a French café turned inside out by a hugely empathic bar-tender who doesn’t miss a thing which goes on around him. Fabre gives Pierre a fabulously realized voice, gravened by loss and softened by routine into something lived in and real-seeming.

 

The mixture of Pierre’s hugely likable voice and the acute melancholy of his observations lends “The Waitress Was New” the peculiar mystery and vividness of lived experience. Pierre directs our eyes, camera-like, around the room, and points out the young man who comes in and reads Primo Levi. He talks about listening to a thrice-married wealthy customer, who goes on a bender from time to time. “I listen while he throws out sentences that don’t always know where they’re going.” Other nights the man undresses and tries to throw himself into the Seine.

 

Quietly, however, Fabre makes it clear that Pierre is in fact as desperate as his customers, even the owner, whose affair with a waitress is partly the reason why this ship is going down. When it does, Pierre, who has been at this job since he was 19, floats free, adrift in Paris, with no human barrier to the intense loneliness that clings to him like a wet coat. At least when there were lovers ruining their lives, young couples camped out at back tables, the pinched contours of his life remained obscured. He was part of something, simply by being there so long people took him for granted.

 

This could be a maudlin story, or a self-pitying one, but Fabre has such a light touch, so many keen, but easily worn observations to make about urban life, that “The Waitress Was New” never becomes that kind of book. Instead, it is in fact perhaps the perfect Valentine’ Day read, a book for the other half of the world that spends this made-up holiday alone.

 

“They’re you’re equals,” Pierre says, of the people who pass and pass, and pass through his life. “They’ll leave you a tip on their way out, but whatever they’ve left hanging in their lives hasn’t budged a bit.”

 

The same goes for the narrator of this mesmerizing, true little book.

 

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.

 

The title and first sentence of his absorbing, ultimately profound novella are identical and herald the end of 56-year-old, very single Pierre’s 20-plus years as a barman in the suburbs of Paris. Of course, he doesn’t know that the end is nigh, though he knows something is afoot. The boss has been noticeably interested in the new waitress’ predecessor, and the boss’ wife has been preoccupied. The boss ducks out before lunch, which is more than usually hectic, and his wife decamps as soon as possible after the rush. Next day, the boss isn’t back, and his wife comes to work only just before things get desperate. A few days proceed in the same manner, and then the boss’ wife leaves, too, closing the café down, temporarily. An unforeseen yet surprising development brings story, café, and Pierre’s job to an end. Fabre tells the whole story from Pierre’s deliberately unassuming, socially inconsequential perspective. By the last page, Pierre has become not Everyman, but all-too-common man.

 

A contemporary novel that employs the unconventional devices associated with le nouveau roman, a fashionable French literary movement of the 1960s whose leading exponent was Alain Robbe-Grillet, may seem passé to many. But Polish writer Magdalena Tulli has added fresh touches to the style and has given Flaw a distinctly East European feel.

The plot is set in and around the main square of an unnamed city. This confined space, penetrated by a lone reappearing streetcar resembles a maze in which a plethora of characters live their lives without venturing very far. Then again, these disembodied characters themselves do not add up to very much and are little more than impersonal physical objects defined by the costumes they wear: those of a policeman, a notary, a maid, an airman. For Tulli, costume defines character. “What would the general’s protruding belly, or the adjutant’s skinny ribs, have been without the insignia of rank?” she writes. For all practical purposes, our daily uniform is what we are. This is a provocative claim by a novelist who is a psychologist by trade.

It is a testimony to Tulli’s inventiveness that despite having created characters less robust than papier-mâché, she has mapped them into some dramatic plotting. The centerpiece is an all-too-familiar modern-day confrontation that pits the longtime residents of the square against a group of refugees. The refugees suddenly arrive by streetcar and invasively occupy the square. “The newcomers’ attire does not blend subtly into the background; on the contrary, it is strikingly dark, and stands out in sharp contours displeasing to the eye.” A respectable housewife peeking through lace curtains into the square expresses her indignation at the newcomers’ arrival. They “ought to realize that they are not at home here.” Among other things, they threaten to bring with them a harsh climate of bitter frosts and blustery snowstorms that are foreign to this place.

The unexpected appearance of destitute refugees in drab winter clothing lugging shabby suitcases in the carefully cultivated gardens of the unremarkable town square can be the story of Everyman, of Everymigrant. Conceivably this event could take place in the Place des Vosges in Paris or the Stortorget in Stockholm as seamlessly as in Warsaw’s Place Zamkowy. Local residents’ reactions would probably be similar. The East Europeanness of Magdalena Tulli’s plaza lies in the costumes that are worn in it. The pervasive drabness of all its inhabitants marks the story as one of a society in transition in which all characters are struggling to put on a better costume.

 

Though I have accepted softcover books as a useful literary appliance, I have never really overcome certain pathological reservations—having said that, I must offer that Archipelago does a fine job of putting out subtly attractive editions. In this case, it has published three of Polish novelist Tulli’s four award-winning novels. Tulli, spoken of as a latter-day Bruno Schulz, writes of an unnamed city devastated by an economic collapse and an influx of refugees. The novel’s prose becomes less and less specific and more of a meditation on story.

 

12 Books of Christmas

This book lover is not satisfied with staying close to home, even when engaging in armchair adventures. For him or her: Flaw (175 pages; Archipelago Books; $14 paperback original), a short but powerful novel by Magdalena Tulli.

Translated from the original Polish by Bill Johnston and published in a typically lovely little soft-cover edition by the elegant Archipelago Books, this book screams, “Serious But Not Boring.”

 

Flaw
By MAGDALENA TULLI

Reviewed by  Christopher Byrd

Recently, I was chatting with a friend over IM about the virtues of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of the 19th-century novel The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. After listening to me gush about how the film’s slow, deliberate pacing mimicked the languorous sentences of the Victorian novels from that era, my friend admitted that he probably wouldn’t like the picture. He sheepishly confessed that the on-demand quick fixes that define a large portion of the entertainment of our era had warped his ability to appreciate fare that was less forthright in its approach. Not being wholly immune to this phenomenon, I hastened to express my sympathies to my friend regarding his predicament.

I have recounted this anecdote as means to introduce the work of the brilliant Polish novelist Magdalena Tulli — whose books might be herded into the category of novels of ideas — to ensure that I don’t make the same mistake twice: i.e., damning with praise. Thus, let me say up front that Tulli’s work, while brimming with serious reflections, is far from dry and almost always immediately rewarding from the outset.

To grasp the context from which Tulli’s oeuvre emerges one should be mindful that throughout the last century, the constricting belts of occupation and repression that wrapped around the lives of countless Poles shaped a culture of opposition. In this climate, underground lectures and publications proliferated. Little marvel, then, that the international, multidisciplinary aesthetic movement that has come to be identified as “modernism” was ported to Poland. For just as modernist artists labored against inherited regimentation of expression, likewise did many citizens in their everyday lives. Perhaps this is why an ethical, not just an aesthetic, mandate seems to inform the compositional innovations that were practiced by some of the most dashing exemplars of 20th-century Polish literature.

One finds evidence of this tradition in the fictional creations of Tulli, who has published four novels, three of which have been translated into English. As might be presumed of a writer who is acquainted with the modernist toolset (she has translated Proust into Polish), much of Tulli’s writing flaunts its artificiality. Time and again in her new novel, Flaw,  as in her previous novel, Moving Parts (2005), a high-toned mockery is made of any pretense toward explaining the reasons behind every event. Fortunately, these narrative feints aren’t superfluous. They’re used as a podium from which to disperse philosophical comments in clear, direct language.

Tulli uses a behind-the-scenes approach to begin Flaw.  An unnamed narrator commissions a tailor and an assortment of tradesmen to construct costumes for the novel’s characters and sets for their actions. From a cursory viewpoint, considering the extent to which movies, alone, have made plentiful use of this meta-narrative device (one thinks, for example, of the opening scene of Godard’s Contempt or Truffaut’s Day for Night), such staginess does appear retrograde. In practice, however, Tulli immediately overcomes the familiar nature of this plot mechanic by milking it for a thoughtful effect.

As in Moving Parts,  the unnamed narrator of Flaw is depicted as a sympathetic bungler who is incapable of conducting the story in an orderly fashion. This image of a beleaguered impresario allows Tulli to pack a judicious amount of buoyancy into her tale of displaced morality. It also emphasizes the writer’s marginal status as a responder to — as opposed to an instigator of — events. For instance, on account of the narrator’s monetary doldrums, the tailor becomes disgruntled with his work:

The more perfect the item that sprang from his needle in the first burst of inspired diligence, before the cash was used up to pay the rent, the greater the subsequent shame when things begin to descend into the mass production of poorly made garments. But shame decays; nothing turns to dust faster. It is wiped off with a clothes brush. Discarding his ambitions, the tailor will from now on cut the cloth sparingly and unimaginatively…. Jackets will restrict freedom of movement by creaking at the seams.

Tulli coasts from an ominous allegory about thwarted potential and diminished freedom, toward a reckoning of how something, i.e., “shame,” operates. It’s her facility with saying what something is, rather than how it feels, that identifies her as an intellectual artist.

This attention to space is a theme revisited throughout Tulli’s books — her 2004 novel Dreams and Stones  ranks among the most accomplished meditations on urban planning in fiction. In Moving Parts,  the narrator tracks the characters through a vertiginously interlocking spatial tissue comprised of a hotel, subway station, bar, house, and circus. Tulli’s liquefaction of boundaries allows her to dream up some genuinely trippy moments — during one part, the narrator, traveling into the bowels of the hotel, encounters a makeshift medical facility for war victims, which must be cleared away to make room for a “German gunboat [that] slowly drops onto the floor.” This incorporation of the surreal frees the narrator to experience and comment ironically on everything from the Soviet invasion of Poland to the redenomination of Polish currency in the 1990s.

In Flaw,  by contrast, spatial parameters are more fixed. Even so, Tulli unmoors her story from specifics. Action takes place either on or behind a set built to “look like some quiet neighborhood of a large city.” Beneath this universal canopy, a notary awakes one morning. Before ducking into his office — which the narrator’s contractors have neglected to erect — the notary drops by a cafe inhabited by a hungover student. At length, the notary receives a phone call from his broker, who informs him that a stock market crash is underway.

News of the disaster spreads quickly, goods are swept off the shelves of stores and a black market comes into being. (Adding to this all-encompassing instability is the fact that the “contractors” helped to engineer the crash.)

Refugees emerge, fresh from who-knows-where. “Up till now they had lived where they belonged, uninitiated into the mysteries of the freight railroad, uninformed about…the economies made in the construction of walls, far away from the notary and his safe.” Deposited by streetcar into the center of the neighborhood, their presence provokes predictable fear in the local residents.

As if all this weren’t enough, an announcement is made on the radio that the government has been ousted in a coup. This brightens the student’s day noticeably. Eager to avail himself of the shifting social climate, he stuffs his pants into his boots and buckles his belt around the outside of his jacket. In congruence with the novel’s leitmotif that clothes can shape one’s circumstances, this stab at military dress up works well enough that soon the student enjoys newfound respect as the organizer of a militia, which keeps an increasingly tight rein over the refuges.

With so much compacted allegory — what with the shady covert machinations, preyed-upon refugees, and hint of a totalitarian dawn — it’s impressive that Flaw  doesn’t flounder, as the story’s narrator does, in its attempt to express the dark opportunism that soiled much of 20th-century European history. But excluding a couple of sections where Tulli indulges in a truism here (“The pity of the majority is reluctant to make sacrifices: custom dictates that its noble impulses are paid for by those it overlooks”) or an overblown description there (“Not a hair on anyone’s head had been harmed and no one had suffered any wrong, aside from a few bruises and a certain amount of spilled blood”), Flaw is agile at exploring the ever fertile soil from which dehumanization can spring.

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

 

Read the article here.

 

That Jacques Poulin’s lovely and obscure 1978 Canadian novel Spring Tides has suddenly, after 30 years, arrived in America becomes less surprising when you learn that the publisher is the Brooklyn-based boutique press Archipelago Books. These, after all, are the folks who ushered Witold Gombrowicz’s extraordinary collection Bacacay into English (from Polish) after nearly 50 years. Since 2003 or so, they’ve been finding untranslated masterpieces and curiosities, binding them handsomely, and making them available to a mostly unaware American readership. Get aware, reader. Mr. Poulin’s Spring Tides is another strange pleasure.

 

Spring Tides concerns a comic strip translator who is known only by his nickname, Teddy Bear, which derives from “T.D.B.,” or “Traducteur de Bandes Desinées.” The eccentric owner of the Quebec newspaper where Teddy works has taken an odd interest in Teddy’s spiritual well-being — “Apparently you’re a ‘socioaffective’ … I don’t know exactly what that means, but I’ve got a question for you: what can I do to make you happy?” — and offered to let him live and work in solitude on a forested island, Ile Madame.

 

At first, accompanied only by his cat Matousalem and the Quebecois waterfowl, Teddy settles into a daily routine of playing tennis against a “matte black and solidly built” mechanical opponent and industriously translating strips like “Tarzan” and “The Phantom.” Then the boss arrives in his helicopter to drop off a new inhabitant, Marie, “blonde with very short hair and eyes as black as coal.” As only a cute, clever, “goofy” girl can, Marie proves a persistent and not unwelcome distraction. She and Teddy go for walks, swim, cook meringue, and generally make the prospect of being sequestered on a woodsy Canadian island with a good companion seem pretty appealing.

 

Unfortunately, the boss’s helicopter returns to Ile Madame with increasing frequency, ferrying in visitors who, with a certain sense of unpleasant inevitability, become inhabitants. Increasingly imperious (“Silence means consent!”), the boss seems determined to populate the island as a sort of vaguely defined social experiment. The new people include the boss’s festive but saggy wife, Featherhead; a literal-minded intellectual called Professor Moccasin (his book “Human Paths” is not philosophical, it’s about paths in the woods); a querulous, self-absorbed Author; an Ordinary Man; an ominous Organizer, and lastly, Old Gélisol, who “emanated a warmth so intense that in the Arctic where he came from, it melted the permafrost on which he sat.”

 

All of the newcomers seem essentially innocuous — Teddy’s amiable interactions with the group take up most of the book’s central third — until suddenly they don’t. While it is pleasurable to share an island with one charming and casually beautiful woman, it’s less of a thrill to be there with a shifting community of people who can, say, form a self-justifying collective and apologetically gang up on you. Other people aren’t quite hell in Spring Tides, but the more there are, the worse it gets.

 

For a while, it seems as if the novel will have no plot, only an accumulation of characters. In the end, that isn’t true; Poulin gently builds something out of the odd, almost arbitrary daily rituals on Ile Madame, and it’s only in retrospect that you see what he’s done. It also seems for a while that the book will stir only the intellect and not the emotions, but that’s not true either — there are two passages at the end, one of parting and one of departure, that are written with such elegance and reserve that I went back and reread them to confirm they were as affecting as I’d remembered.

 

Poulin’s language is simple, even affable, but he can also summon an austere and chilling beauty. Here’s Marie as she tells the story of an “old cachalot” (a sperm whale) descending into the ocean’s cellar to battle a many-tentacled “Onychoteuthis” (guess): “Above his head he sees a vast luminous carpet, gradually moving away from him. … It is becoming colder and darker. At three hundred meters, the water is dark blue. The cachalot goes even deeper, slowly, like a great submarine, and the light turns violet, then there’s black, icy darkness.” And later, Marie writes a strange little poem down from memory. It begins: “Animals are born, they pass by, they die. / Then comes the great cold, / the great cold of night and the dark.”

 

The most affecting aspect of Spring Tides, I think, is the unexpected sense of loss that sneaks up on you at the end of the novel, like a sudden deep pain, as if Poulin has been distracting you by making shadows with one hand while the other did its subtle, cutting work.

 

Mr. Antosca last wrote for these pages on Rupert Thomson.