The CircaËte, or Snake Eagle, endemic to the CÈvennes, subsists entirely on snakes, especially the grass snake (according to Oiseaux.net). A reader of David Hinton’s Fossil Sky will learn this in the notes glossing the name of a bird, whose cries of “pkeer pkeer” punctuate the poem. The “jacket” blurb tells us that the poem, which “distills a year of walks taken near the poet’s home,” was written “during a period of time he spent in southern France.”

The poem comes folded up exactly like a map, spreads across a huge “page” measuring roughly four feet square, and is bounded by a thin blue circle (radius of about 26 inches). The myriad “lines” squiggle across it like ant trials or the cracks in a heated tortoise shell. (The author appears to have made use of the “Bezier paths” tool in layout software.) At first glance, the reader might think s/he is looking at a “map” of the poet’s walks near his home in the CÈvennes. (Did the poet trace his lines over the trails marked on his topographical map?) There is no clear indication where the poem “starts” and where it “finishes.” At what appears to be roughly the center of the blue circle, we begin to read, “Tracing spring’s return for weeks before hearing an old friend far away died in late winter.” This “trail” continues for three more winding phrases of similar length, separated by triple spaces—reflections on familiarity and “earth’s elemental indifference.” It crosses three other trails, including the head of another trail that begins “A thin scree of light pollen hisses on the clear glacial lake . . . ”

While it might be tempting to think this “center” of the sphere represents the location of the poet’s home, since three other trails issue from that spot, there are many other such centers on the map, constituted by three or four emerging lines, appearing to gravitate together like chromosomes under a microscope. This pattern of centers and wandering peripheries gives the whole a pleasantly random yet harmonious aspect. Furthermore, isolated phrases—“The no beckons,” “wings shimmering,” “a roof,” “hear waves”—and words—“oxygen,” “carbon,” “laughing,” an onomatopoetic “pKeeerr”—spray off the ends of lines in a way that indicates, in some respects at least, the mimesis and expressivity of a calligramme rather than cartographic projection.

One also wonders about the compositional method, in relation to walking: were the lines and stanzas for this poem culled from notes kept while walking? Or just after walks? Did the poet plot his lines while contemplating a map of his walks? Or were they otherwise “recollected in tranquility”? Were the lines composed with an aleatoric procedure such as Richard Tuttle’s wire release sculptures?

Is the poem “projective,” in the Olsonian sense, a work of “open” form or “composition by field”? Does it, at all points, “go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares”? There is a feeling of tracery, as if the poem might have been composed beforehand and then each section “set” into a long bezier curve, with extra spaces for the line breaks, and capital letters indicating new stanzas, as in the following:

We’re more sky than anything else
more sights and sounds forgotten and lost
but light forgets it all perfectly:

Frost-glazed grasses shimmer
shuddering under faint breezes
slowly turning meltwater dark

Frost heavier down along the shoreline
promising the wordless
ink-dark clarities snow brings to lake-water

It’s cold and frost-melt wet
and I’ll soon remember nothing about this routine walk

Perhaps I should have stayed home:
a roof
a fire
a family

But there are other forms of shelter:
Boundless sky
cocoon light
whisper snow

Is it more than an arrangement, to have this set along a squiggling, intermittent line? Either way, it does seem that the exploitation of new typesetting technology, to draw out, bend and pluck stanzas (as when the six short phrases in the last two “stanzas“ fly off in different directions like sparks, birds or droplets), and the layering of these drawn-out stanzas, within the poem’s blue horizon, to create something like a simultaneous network, rather than linear “message,” initiates an entirely different experience for the reader.

The large format is both overwhelming and accessible in one glance. The intermittent spaces (that I have interpreted as “stanza” breaks) allow one to pick up, or drop, the reading of any given line at multiple points. And sometimes the line, like a mineral seam, disappears for quite a ways, to get picked up only later by the carefully tracking eye. Sometimes a line splits into several branches, or several lines combine into one. And, occasionally, lines loop back as if to swallow their tails, or cross back over themselves, as if to delimit a “closed area”—reinforcing that uncertain “weren’t we here before?” feeling. Finally, on one occasion, at least (when “You might pile such ruins up into a borie and light a candle” intersects with “A mourning candle burns down into shallows”) two different lines share the same word (“candle”) so that the reader suddenly is faced with a fork in the “track.” (“Borie,” according to an author’s note, is a dome-shaped shelter built without mortar from stones gathered in the fields, traditional to the farmlands of Provence since the neolithic.) At the word “candle” two tracks suddenly become four—an experience familiar to anyone who’s hiked goat trails. As in such a maze, or hive, there’s seemingly an infinite number of tracks to follow, poems to read.

The further the walker gets from home the more s/he is asked to reflect on “other forms of shelter,” on what it might mean to be “sheltered” by sky, light, snow; similarly, we might ask what shelters the poem, once removed from the book? Where Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems “contains” its infinitude within the closed form of the sonnet, Hinton chooses to bound his forking composition with the simple, yet hermeneutically loaded, gesture of a blue circle. (Hommage to Richard Long?) The careful yet seemingly random distribution of the lines, the visual element of the composition that aims to please the unifying glance as much as the particulate examination, “extends” the “content” of Hinton’s meditations on nature, transience, home, mortality and the “long view” of old age (“early crickets pitched too high for aging ears”):

We cannot say the lake cares, cannot say it doesn’t
Yes, the particular is meaningless

. . .

long-legged, skitterish, sunning
motionless on the warm stone ruins, a cricket
startles away

. . .

The long view is a mirror . . .
sight leaving earth’s every instance perfectly itself

Fossil Sky calls into question the supposed “nonlinearity” of projectivist compositions (in, say, works by Olson, Eigner, Howe), which, compared to this work, still seem ruled by a left-to-right and top-to-bottom reading grid. Its large format also exceeds the measures of most digital work. And what a spin on proprioception: the poem’s snaking lines curve “upside down” so that you have to twist your head around to keep reading—or, as a blurb on the cover-fold suggests, put the poem on the floor, get down on your hands and knees and crawl around it.

The poem is full of transcendental observations (“Lit gold lining the parched whorl of broom’s empty seedpods”) yet it is not romantic:

Exhausted after three days tending a sick family
I set out to gather fresh rose-hips among mountains forgetting them
selves in turn now
and too tired even for a lazy walk through this afternoon’s weave of all
that was or ever will be here
I meet mountain peaks on their own terms
sentinels of indifference deep in their vast histories

Literary-philosophical sources for the discipline of “forgetting” this poem seems to urge, and for its nominalism of particulars, will no doubt be found in the works of the Chinese mountain poets Hinton is an accomplished translator of, or in Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior. But the openings of the form can lead to “extra-literary” uses: keep it on your wall, pick out a line at random and zoom in for a moment’s thought or bit of advice. (In this sense it does work like the Chinese diviner’s heated tortoise shell.) Furthermore, the recurrent CircaËte and the never-ending form almost serve to turn the reader into a “Snake hawk”: is this the hawk’s eye view of the poet’s walks?

The long view is also a mirror: watch out —when you begin to take the poem in, like the CircaËte you may find yourself digesting the head of your prey while you are still swallowing the tail.

 

Landscape with Yellow Birds—the title is from the Paul Klee painting –is a well-conceived collection of poems selected from 17 books of José Ángel Valente’s poetry, ranging from A Modo de Esperanza (In a Hopeful Mode, 1953–1954), Mr. Valente’s first volume of poetry, to Fragmentos de un Libro Futuro (Fragments from a Future Book, 1991–2000) which includes poems written prior to his death in 2000.

 

Born in 1929 in Spain, Mr. Valente took a degree from the University of Madrid in 1953. Given that his family was in diminished standing with Franco, he lived abroad for many years, originally in Oxford, where he taught, then in Geneva, and finally in Paris. During all these years, Mr. Valente wrote poetry and published critical articles. He eventually returned to Spain in 1986, taking up residence in Andalusia.

 

Tom Christensen has prepared a penetrating and complete Translator’s Preface, summarizing Mr. Valente’s biographical details and covering critical areas of the poetry itself, placing Mr. Valente’s work in perspective relative to the Spanish poetry of his time.

 

Various critics agree that while Mr. Valente’s early poetry was associated with the so-called “Generation of the 1950s,” a poetry characterized by Spanish social consciousness, his subsequent work moved closer to the Modernist tradition.

 

One inescapable fact remains: Mr. Valente’s poems as selected and arranged in this collection demonstrate a seamless whole, a unity in which the earlier poems introduce themes and motifs that reappear with renewed intensity and increasing development throughout the collection.

 

Mr. Valente uses his extensive aesthetic vocabulary to work and rework variations on a series of themes: darkness and shadow, ashes and memory, death and passion, blindness and solitude. Themes that engaged the poet in his youth remain central to his mature work.

 

These are poems to be read slowly, filled as they are with nuanced appeals for deeper and deeper reflection. The repetitive patterns and rhythms in many of these poems reinforce, and as they close or resolve, illustrate Mr. Valente’s continued quest for self-discovery.

 

This is a poet obsessed by love, love in all of its joy and passion, love in its darkness, its pain, and its desperation. Mr. Valente understands that love is not afraid to wound, to draw blood. His poetry opens the reader “The way the body of wounded love was opened/like a bird of fire/ignited by blind hands.”

 

These lines from “Material Memory,” 1977–1978, unite passion with pain, blindness with fire. Written at the mid-mark of Mr. Valente’s poetic career, this quote embodies the mysticism, the opening-up to the sacred that reflects his growing interest in Heideggerian philosophy.

 

Any collection of poems spanning 17 volumes of verse and a lifetime of aesthetic and scholarly achievement is bound to present a challenge, both to the editors of the volume and to the reader. Many poems must be left out of such a volume. The arrangement of the poems selected requires careful judgment and acute linguistic sensitivity, particularly in view of the additional layer of complexity imposed by the fact that this collection is a translation.

 

Despite these challenges the editors and the translator have done a very creditable job in producing a manuscript of smoothly interwoven and carefully translated poems that furnish the English language reader with an excellent picture of Mr. Valente’s work—a remarkable synthesis that grows and deepens with each reading.

 

Mr. Valente’s imagery develops over the decades into a ritual creativity of dark mysteries, shadows of the sacred: “At dusk the unseen hand of a god removes you like the wing of a bird fallen into dense shadows beyond the shadows. You are dissolved, finally, within your own gaze.”

 

This quote is from “The Singer Does Not Awaken,” 1992, Part II: “Landscape with yellow birds,” a series of Mr. Valente’s mature prose poems, poems that combine the lyrical certainty of sure poetic craft with the mystical tension—both physical and psychological—of this consummate Spanish poet.

 

This collection is not only an important contribution to Spanish-language poetry in translation, it is a passionate joy to read.

What makes identical twins so intriguing is the paradox of sameness and difference together. We imagine that they are the same on the outside but inscrutably different on the inside (though how can we ever know?), or perhaps the same when they start out, until the whims of fate send them down widely divergent paths. Literary twins with a single will and destiny are the exception: witness Sam and Eric, virtually indistinguishable in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. For the most part – and it makes for potent drama –  one of the twins is evil, or sick, or kidnapped, or lost, or dead. Then the piquant question is, how does the loss leave the remaining one? Bereft? Devestated? Relieved? Some guilty combination of all three?

The nexus of loss, identity, and destiny is probed relentlesly yet with a rough tenderness in The Twin, a stunning first novel by the Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker. As boys, the twins Henk and Helmer live with their parents on a farm near Amsterdam; they are so cose that “When we touched each other, we touched ourselves. Feeling someone else’s heartbeat and thinking it’s your own, you can’t get any closer than that”.

Helmer is the protagonist, and in his austere, shrewd, and often droll voice, he tells of his desolate life after his brother’s death at nineteen, with finely paced interpolations from their youth. Now fifty-five, Helmer lives with his widowed, bedridden father, caring for him just enough to keep him alive, which, we soon learn, is pretty much what the father deserves, given the way he treated his sons. Helmer’s accounts of washing his father and taking him to the bathroom manage to be both witty and troubling, a hybrid dark tone Bakker excels at. As the novel opens, Helmer moves his father from the downstairs master bedrom to his own small, cold room upstairs. He redecorates and takes over the old man’s imminent death and his own freedom.

The family drama that generates Helmer’s current predicament has a tinge of fable: wicked father; kind but ineffectual mother; identical brothers; death of the favored twin, meaning that “Father had to make do with me, but in his eyes I always remained second choice”. Years later, the head brother’s fiancee reappears with a son, also ninteen, also named Henk…As in myth, the same few elements keep recombining.

Aside from terse dialogues with his father, Helmer’s connections are few: there’s the woman from a neighboring farm and her two young sons, with whom he is gruffly companionable; the two tanker drivers who pick up his milk supply; and the livestock dealer who buys his animals. Mostly he’s in the company of the cows and sheep (technically his father’s) and the two useless donkeys he’s fond of (his own). The landscape is minimal as well, described in a pure unadorned prose that suggests a seventeenth-century Dutch painting – simple yet rich and dim with mystery; the old-fashioned farmhouse and sheds, the seasonal shifts in weather, the canal beyond the road leading to the nearest town and to the Amsterdam ferry, All this we get to know well; it’s the kind of novel where you feel you’ve moved in with the characters. Spareness – in style as well as setting – has rarely yielded such abundance.

The young Helmer and Henk were groomed for different paths. Henk, the father’s favorite, is to take over the farm: he has the will and the aptitude. He also has a fiancee, Riet, who will share his future on the land. Helmer, at nineteen, attends university in Amsterdam, studying language and literature. Even beore Henk’s death, he suffers a loss. Until Riet appears on the scene, the brothers enjoy their rare closeness, “shoulder to shoulder…chest to chest…taking each other’s presence for granted.” But with Riiet in his life, Henk no longer wants Helmer sharing his bed.

“Piss off,” he said. Shivering, I walked back to my own bed. It was freezing, the new year had just begun and the next morning the window was covered from top to bottom with frost flowers. We had become a pair of twins with two bodies.

The only one on the farm who seems aware of Helmer as a person in his own right is Jaap, the hired man, who came to work there ten years before, when he too was about nineteen. In his loneliness, the young Helmer takes to visiting Jaap, going swimming with him, drinking beer in his cottage, and drawing sustenance from him. “You’re not your brother,” Jaap reminds him. And, “I don’t know exactly how it works with twins…but I can imagine them having to split up eventually.” He reassures Helmer that he too will one day have an independent life.

“It’ll come,” he said. He checked the trembling of my lip by kissing me on the mouth the way you might kiss your grandfather on the mouth once in your ife when you grandmother has died. “All that will come in time”.

But it doesn’t. What comes instead is the news that Henk has drowned in an auto accident. The car, driven by Riet, was forced off the road by an oncoming vehicle and lands in a canal. Riet escapes, but cannot open the door to release Henk, even with help from passervy: “His hair floated back and forth like seaweed,” she recalls thirty-five years later.

The tragic loss of the brother he loved with a quasi-eroctic attachment leaves Helmer a half-formed adolescent, overwhelmed by grief and uncertain of his place in the world. “I felt that I would be forgotten: Father and Mother were the parents, Riet was the almost-wife, I was just the brother.” His father promptly decides Helmer’s future: “You’re done there in Amsterdam.” Helmer leaves the university to become a farmer, in effect taking over Henk’s life: “A collection of buildings, animals and land I didn’t want anything to do with, an entity that was forced on me, but gradually became part of me.”

This is the kernel of the story: a man “forced” to live a life not his own. What can he make of this life? Helmer knows who he is, as does the reader: his narrative voice is utterly authentic and entrancing in its blend of melancholy and esprit. What he’s never had a chance to discover is what he wants, alterntaives to the unintended life that gradually became part of him.

But was he forced? Did he had a choice? Helmer begins wondering as he watches pieces of his life one by one fall away like a crumbling house: the livestock dealer retires and moves to New Zealand; one of the milk truck drivers dies and the other gets a new route. He never protested his father’s command of thirty-five years ago, Helmer realizes Even the wretched, mean-spirited father, immobilized in his cold bed, says, “You never said anything… You never said you didn’t want to.” The habit of obedience and passivity was reflexive.

The paradigm begins to shift when Helmer receives serveral letters from Riet. What she might want of him at this late date is unclear: forgiveness, absolution, diversion, maybe even marriage? (She married after Henk’s death, but is now widowed.) She asks Helmer to take in her son as a temporary farm hand in an effort to rouse him: the boy lies around all day with no ambition or desire. So again as in myth, the stanger arrives – another nineteen-year-old boy, also named Henk- to disrupt a static situation.

This new young Henk is taciturn but civil, more or less obedient and helpful, and curious about the family history.

“What’s it like, having a twin brother?” he asks.

“It’s the most beautiful think in the world, Henk.”

“Do you feel like half a person right now?”

I want to say something, but I can’t I even need to grab one of the struts to stop myself from falling. I’ve always been forgotten: I was the brother… And now Riet’s son stands opposite me and asks me if I feel like half a person. Henk grabs me by the shoulders; I shake him off.

“What are you crying about?” he asks.

Henk’s identity and role on the arm are ambiguous: not quite a nephew, certainly not a son, not quite a hired man either, though Helmer experiments with treating him like each of these in turn. Helmer is also made neasy by Henk’s coming to sleep in his bed, just as he himself used to curl up in his brother’s bed long ago. The relationship grows more entangled when Helmer nearly drowns in a ditch, smother by a stray sheep, but is rescued in the nick of time by Henk. In Bakker’s tragi-comic vision, even near-disaster can have an absurdist cast. Just as Helmer was always the slower, less graceful twin, his echo of Henk’s death, under a sheep in a ditch, is burlesque in comparison.

Inevitably, Henk goes home and the old father dies, leaing Helmer alone, his future both free and empty. Already he’s feeling the stirring of change: “I’ve been doing things by halves for so long now. For so long I’ve had just half a body… But it’s no longer enough.” Once more as in myth, rescue and renewal come out of the blue as Jaap, the sympathetic hired man of years ago, returns. So happy a coincidence is the only move in the story that feels more willed than organic, but by this time we are so enmeshed, so invested in Helmer’s fate that we accept it as we would a deux ex machina in an ancient drama. The old friendship ripens into what can only be called love, though the word is never used. “Suddenly the time between his departure and return no longer interest me. Or even the time of his arrival. What difference does it make?”

With the whole world at his disposal, Helmer chooses to return to the farm. He finds he can’t part with the sheep, the landscape, or the life that was thrust on him and that he unthinkingly accepted. This wise and impeccably fashioned novel offers a bittersweet illustration of Nietzsche’s Amor fati, to love one’s fate –  more bitter than sweet.

 

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.”

 

8/10/2010

Another rave for The Twin:

“Tense with unuttered yearning. . . . The greatness of this book lies . . . in a mounting intricacy of feeling as life begins to burgeon out of a stony, wasted existence. . . . But instead of something terrible happening . . . rillets of sweetness and joy arise, little springs of gladness. . . . . In the end . . . this becomes a kindhearted book, kind to both characters and reader.” –Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe

I just finished The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, which is basically all about themes that I associate with crushing boredom — farmers and old, sick parents and rural areas — but I couldn’t put it down. It’s subtle, quiet, hilarious, cruel, beautiful, and somehow exhilarating in all of its understatement. It has a protagonist with a unique voice. It never hits a false note. It never hits a predictable note. Reading a book like that is joyous, especially when it keeps rereading itself in your head, your heart, and your life for a few days or weeks afterwards.

For the complete article, click here.

“A chilling story of the past’s influence on the present” – ‘The Twin’ by Gerbrand Bakker

A chilling story of the past’s influence on the present.

 

The Twin

A Novel

Gerbrand Bakker, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer

Archipelago: 250 pp., $25

The story is eerily familiar, whether you are rural or urban, male or female, happy or unhappy. Twin brothers grow up on the family farm with their domineering, harsh father and their quiet, subservient mother

One is the father’s favorite, destined to inherit the farm. When he dies in a car accident, the other brother is left to run it, care for his dying father — and narrate the story.

All his life he feels like half of a person, going through his daily routine, not knowing how it was that he got here but aware that his life is slipping away, habit by habit.

One day, many years later, he gets a letter from his dead brother’s fiancée, who was responsible for the accident. She wants to send her disaffected 18-year-old son to live with him and work on the farm.

In the course of the novel, the still subconscious of the twin left behind is revealed to us, memory by memory. As these memories slash the surface of his life, they cannot help but erode his calloused exterior.

Gerbrand Bakker’s writing is fabulously clear, so clear that each sentence leaves a rippling wake.

susan.reynolds@latimes.com

One day, thinking that he is asleep, Helmer van Wonderen tells his bedridden father the truth about how he feels: “I can’t stand you because you have ruined my life. I don’t call a doctor because I think it is high time you stopped ruining my life, and I tell Ada you’re senile because it makes things that much easier. If you’re senile, then none of it makes any difference anyway.”

Helmer, the narrator of Gerbrand Bakker’s exquisite debut novel The Twin, had to struggle all his life for recognition. He feels one with his identical twins brother Henk. The two boys grow up on a farm in Holland in the fifties and sixties under the strict, often cruel, rule of their father, and surrounded by the ever sympathising but helpless love of their mother. Although Helmer is older by a few minutes, his father chooses Henk to take over the farm and ostentatiously favours the younger brother. Helmer quietly accepts the imposed hierarchy, and when he is old enough decides to study Dutch philology at the University in nearby Amsterdam. He finds an unexpected ally in the farmhand, Jaap.

When Henk falls in love with the beautiful Riet, Helmer feels halved. His brother’s relationship and impending marriage reinforce his outsider position. Because Henk and Riet are destined to take over the farm, Jaap is told to find another job. Then a tragic accident shatters all their lives. Henk dies, leaving behind a devastated fiancée and family, but most of all his twin Helmer who for the rest of his life tries to find a wholeness which seems irrevocably lost through his brother’s absence. Henk’s death has another crushing consequence. After the funeral, without consulting him, Helmer’s father decides that his son is “done there in Amsterdam.” He also tells Riet to leave the farm and never to return since she was driving the car in which Henk died.

Helmer returns home to take over his brother’s place at his father’s side attending to the farm: “After Henk died Father had to make do with me, but in his eyes I always remained second choice.” For the next thirty years Helmer dutifully follows his father’s orders. His mother dies of a heart attack and the two embittered men are left alone on the farm. When the father’s health begins to fail him, Helmer gradually takes over the farm and the house. He decides to swap bedrooms with his father and redecorates most of their home. He grudgingly tends to his bedridden parent, but his reluctant care is torture to both of them. An ominous hooded crow watches over their lives.

They are visited by the neighbour’s wife, Ada, and her two small sons who come to play with Helmer’s donkeys, the only animals on the farm he really cares about. Every night before going to bed, Helmer recites the names of Danish villages and towns he traces on the map hanging on his wall. Going away is not his only secret wish he keeps hidden from the world.

Out of the blue, Helmer receives a letter from Riet who asks him to take on her son as a farmhand. First her and then the young man’s arrival on the farm upset the carefully balanced order of the place and forces Helmer to confront some truths about himself he has been avoiding all his life.

The Twin is a haunting book about making choices and the consequences of what happens when we think that we are left with none. It is also a superb study of the often destructive need to avenge the wrongs we feel, rightly or wrongly, others have committed against us.

The Twin was published originally in Dutch two years ago under the title Boven is het stil (Upstairs It Is Quiet) and was sensitively translated by David Colmer into English. It is upstairs in the farmhouse where Helmer sequesters his father and where Riet’s son moves into a room. Helmer remains downstairs, listening to the noises the two men make, hoping that the former will die and the latter leave. However, with silence comes not only solace, but also loss.

Gerbrand Bakker’s prose is powerful in its quietness. He captures with compassion the rhythms of his characters’ lives set in rural Holland at the end of the twentieth century. The Twin moves easily between Helmer’s past and present, illuminating with immaculate skill the strained relationships of his life. Bakker allows the reason for Helmer’s solitude to dawn on us slowly and in the process draws the reader into his world. Turning the last page leaves one achingly deprived, longing for more.