Yuri Rytkheu’s A Dream in Polar Fog is a reminder of a time when novels had adventure and mystery, before the ubiquity of video made everything on Earth seem familiar, yet also abstract and distant. Its themes are grand, elemental, and simple, comprehensible in the junior high school manner of discussing literature (Man v. Nature, Man v. Himself, and so on), but also tricky and subtle. This is the work of a writer in full command of the novelistic form. It recalls, in both substance and style, the best work of Jack London and Herman Melville, and it is a novel in the grandest sense of the world.

 

Unlike so many contemporary fiction writers, this author isn’t looking to impress us with his cleverness or with narrative trickery. He’s trying to reclaim the story of a people before it disappears forever, and his efforts give A Dream in Polar Fog an extraordinary urgency. Rytkheu is a descendent of the Chukchi people, an Arctic aboriginal tribe whose land happened to fall under control of the Russian Czar in the 1800s. His narrative begins at the dawn of the twentieth century, as modernity begins to make its creeping assault on the “authentic” Chukchi way of life. Rytkheu depicts that assault sympathetically while not descending unto the reductionist pits of political correctness. As he tells the story, the Chukchi are not savage, but neither are they particularly noble. Their simple life on the shores of an icy sea may have a kind of cleansing purity, but it’s also a hellish battle with the elements that seems, at times, inhuman.

 

Modernity arrives in the form of John MacLennan, the story’s protagonist, a Canadian sailor wounded in a gruesome accident and stranded by his mates to live in an alien Arctic wasteland. He serves as our narrative proxy. As he heals from his terrible injuries, our perspective on the culture unfolds along with his. He begins in abject terror, in a scene as terrifying as any in a contemporary horror movie, while a native shaman amputates his hands to stop the “black blood” of frostbite from stopping his heart; he truly believes that the Chukchi are going to eat him. Gradually, they nurse him back to health, and he becomes one of them, to the point where he marries a naÔve woman and fathers her children.

 

Yet this is no Dances with Wolves. The natives aren’t depicted as a pure alternative to the encroachments of the white men. Some of them are selfish, greedy, and superstitious. Others are prideful to a fault. While some of the native customs and myths Rytkheu describes are quite beautiful, some seem needlessly cruel. Similarly, the white men are depicted in various ways: some of the sailors the Chukchi encounter are honorable, while others seek to rob them of their food supply. Explorers arrive and offer aid, while greedy traders seek to accelerate the culture’s destruction for personal gain. Looming in the background are the Alaskan gold rush and, later, the Russian Revolution. In modern times, no people escape the torrents of history.

 

MacLennan, whose perspective occupies nearly the entire narrative, is himself a mess of contradictions. On the one hand, the book depicts his journey toward consciousness, both of himself and of nature’s greater plan. He learns to become self-reliant even without his hands, and quickly tries to stop imposing his own cultural values on the people who saved his life. But he’s also maddeningly self-righteous and self-sacrificing, working against his best interests even when his adopted tribe begs him otherwise.

 

Beyond the book’s grand themes and conflicts, which are many, Rytkheu depicts, simply but in great detail, the customs, traditions, and circumstances of a people whose lives are utterly unlike our own. There are walrus hunts, shamanic ceremonies, and long sled-drives across the tundra. By book’s end, you know what seal meat tastes like and how to bring a duck down from the sky without the use of a gun. There is a heartbreaking and harrowing famine chapter. The agony and chill feel palpable, and Rytheu makes a point quite strongly and surprisingly: modern people don’t have to suffer like this. They have heating sources and food in tins. Some traditions should endure, while others should fade into the past. Yesterday is different than tomorrow, cultures merge and transform, and the earth is a mutual entity. Those occasional departures from sentimentality give this novel a maturity that most books about “native” people seem to lack.

 

The Arctic landscape overwhelms all else in the book. It can’t be separated from the people who occupy it:

Quietly, the ocean breathed. Water splashed by a thick faultline in the blue ice. Toko looked over to the eastern side of the sky, to where a distant cape pointed a long black finger at the vastness of the seascape. The sky above the crags was clear, nothing to indicate a change of weather. But you had to be careful in springtime. The wind could suddenly change, and the crevasse-covered ice could break into ice floes from a light breeze and carry the hunters out into the open sea.

Rarely has humanity’s relationship to nature been so beautifully and vividly depicted. A Dream in Polar Fog is both elegant and exciting and also serves as a living anthropology of a gone world. It accomplishes everything a novel should.

 

Neal Pollack is the author of three books of satire, including The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature (McSweeney’s) and the rock-n-roll novel Never Mind the Pollacks (HarperCollins). He also edited the anthology Chicago Noir (Akashic). His memoir, Daddy Was a Sinner, will be published by Pantheon in the fall of 2006.

The words of the criminally insane always bring a unique perspective. “George Letham: Physician and Murderer” is a translation of the chilling German novel that follows George Letham, a physician who is baffled by his own actions as a doctor as he studies himself as he continues his crimes. A truly intriguing and thought provoking read, the character conflicted in his interests of silence and his passion for murder leads to a unique read unlike any other. “George Letham” is expertly translated by Joel Rotenburg, a top grade pick for literary fiction collections.

Elisabeth Rynell’s newest book was a finalist for the August Strindberg Prize and is her first novel to appear in English. Translated from the Swedish by Victoria Häggblom, To Mervas follows a pair of previous prose works–A Tale of Loka and Hohaj–as well as the poetry volumes Night Conversations, Sorrow Winged Angels, and Desert Wanderer.

To Mervas concerns itself with Marta, a middle-aged woman living alone in the city who is as far-removed from her family and friends as she is from her own crippling past. The book opens with Marta receiving word from Kosti, her long-lost lover, and the message is almost as mysterious as it is brief. Stirred by his sudden interruption, Marta decides to journey to Mervas in search of Kosti, but first she must overcome a measure of stasis in order to come to terms with the more horrific aspects of her personal history. Unfortunately for Marta, she is not merely a victim: she has acted at least as much as she has been acted upon, though what might be bad news for her is a boon for the psychology of her character. This allows Rynell to skirt the specter of melodrama as her narrative technique and use of language serve to create a timeless world that epitomizes the mystery inherent in good storytelling.

Considering her lyrical prowess, it’s fitting that Rynell introduces To Mervas with an eloquent epigram in three stanzas. “Life must be a story,” she begins, “or else it will crush you.” And though such a sweeping declaration could easily be misconstrued by a weary reading public, these opening sentiments shine brightly because of the graceful nature of the tale that follows. At least as significant, however, is the way the epigram springs to life in the following stanza and provides an adequate denouement in the third: “I’ve been thinking that just like a fire, a story too has its place, its hearth. From there it rises and burns. Devours its tale.” The stanzas perhaps work best as a brief epilogue, since their success hinges on the elliptical nature of the observations. But the lines also foreshadow an interesting technical decision as author and character will at times crowd the narrative for control over the tale.

The truth is that the words from the epigrams seem to originate in Marta since her search for identity directs the course of the plot–and the inclusion of a speaker in stanza two makes its own rhetorical case. But more than this, the language here is Marta’s language, just as the novel represents Marta’s story. Though the action concerns a fairly straightforward journey, the structure is not simplistic; Rynell switches between an epistolary first-person point of view–in the form of Marta’s diary–and a limited third-person that allows her to comment from beyond the margins. A series of flashbacks allows readers to witness Marta’s tortured childhood, concentrating chiefly on an abusive father who forces himself upon her mother in full view of his children. When Marta herself becomes a parent after a one-night stand, Rynell does not shy away from exploring Marta’s flaws, a strategy that reminds us that fictional lives are not always meant to brighten the corners of every room. Marta leaves for Mervas in a rickety, recently purchased automobile, an act that registers enormously as she must first give up her flat and reflect on the death of her severely handicapped son. Though his presence defined Marta as a sort of modern-day Hester Prynne, his death destroys her, and the fact that she is responsible creates an unflattering parental parallel. Her memories are presented in detail but without much commentary or judgment, and this analytical approach is as startling as it is lucid: Marta recounts her life with the same unwavering commitment to penance that one might find in a lesser saint–but one, like Augustine, that best understands sin from experience.

Such talk of course returns us to the danger of melodrama, and since Marta does in fact achieve a measure of success in her battle with the past, it’s significant that Rynell keeps her protagonist from giving over to histrionics. Marta sees the diary as a process of “assembling, comparing, sorting, and memorizing” her thoughts, as she and Kosti worked previously on archaeological excavations; but the metaphor here needs to be more than an act of thematic convenience, and this is where Rynell’s innovative gambles pay off.

The shift in point of view doesn’t disrupt continuity nearly as much as it should. The novel is divided into four sections which are split equally between the first-person diary entries and the limited third-person. Stylistically, the prose doesn’t change much when we leave Marta’s perspective, as Rynell continues to write in the same odd, despairing, and unhappily comic manner that she uses for Marta’s interior accounts. Marta sees things plainly, if not simply; she exhibits the artifacts of her past as if she is curator of a museum, thus avoiding the confessional tendencies common to the epistolary form. Instead, the prose is interesting if not exactly lucid, full of wonderfully awkward phrases and descriptions that are easier to comprehend than to see:

The world is empty, I thought as I walked along. Just that: the world is empty. Here, on these flayed, meat-colored shores, it becomes visible; here it becomes true. The world is empty. The words ran through me repeatedly, although I didn’t quite understand them. I didn’t even agree.

Since the novel is in translation, credit should be given to Häggblom for her wonderful invention of Marta in English, since Rynell surely created a perfectly forlorn version in her native tongue. Nonetheless, I can only assume that both writers do a remarkable job mastering the nuance of incantation which is always capable of holding us in a spell. Since Rynell is also an accomplished poet, it isn’t surprising that To Mervas at times reads like a novel in verse, a fluctuating meditation on the nature of life and living, a wonderfully complex metaphor for trying and failing and trying again.

Only when I was living in Krakow about ten years ago and saw a production of Beckett’s “I’ll Go On” in London did I suddenly see Ireland and Poland as doubles—small countries with beleaguered pasts, a history of failed uprisings, proclivities for
Catholicism and drink, and a preternatural talent for dark absurdist humor, gift of the gab, and, whether despite or because of all the aforementioned, damn great literature.

But as much as I’ve grown to respect Polish literature, I hesitated before embarking on Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone, a 500-plus-page commitment of a novel described as “peasant literature.” It’s not that I didn’t trust the novel insomuch as I didn’t trust myself, a self-described city girl whose closest positive encounter with nature was admiring “The Gleaners,” François Millet’s 1857 painting of three peasant women gathering grain after the harvest, housed at the Musée D’Orsay.

Myśliwski—twice the recipient of Poland’s highest literary prize, the Nike—is known for vividly rendering the physical, cultural, and linguistic landscape of the rural Poland he grew up in, as well as the hardships and challenges, both practical and existential, that were presented first by war, and later by modernization under communism. Stone Upon Stone opens in mid-twentieth-century Poland with the building of a tomb, and goes on to relay various degradations of peasant life amidst war and hunger, including a great love lost. But this is not a dark tale. Szymek Pietruszka, the protagonist-narrator of this flowing and continually digressing monologue, was “always more interested in living than in dying.” As the embodiment of strength and ingenuity and an enduring and quite sizeable lust for life (women and drink included), Szymek muses, “Who knows, maybe living is the eleventh commandment that God forgot to tell us.”

Szymek, the least likely of four brothers to take over the family farm, constantly causes mischief as a child, to the point that his superstitious and God-fearing father almost hangs the young boy in a fit of rage for having eaten a hidden piece of stale Christmas bread meant to bless the spring soil. Recollections of his family and coming
of age, the dances and skirmishes of village life, his turns as a barber, policeman, wedding official, and government worker, are all interwoven with stories of his near death experiences as a resistance fighter during the war.

Despite the proximity of death, Szymek’s recounting of his wartime episodes contain an absurdist humor that rings Monty Python-esque. At one point, frustrated by a subordinate called “Prosecutor,” whose hand-written death orders are
consistently too long—“I can’t tell if it’s a sentence or a sermon”—Szymek tells him, “Try writing a couple more. Make up some bad guys. You’ll get the hang of it, you will.” Other defining aspects of Szymek are his call-it-as-he-sees-it irreverence and a paradoxical mix of hard living and brutality combined with pockets of empathy and a poetic eye for natural beauty. Imagery, traditions, and cadences of the old peasant way of life, slowly giving way to the new, are filtered through his acute gifts for observation and storytelling. The village farmers line up, angrily waiting to cross a new asphalt road, cars whizzing by. They wonder why people are in such a hurry, given “the sky’s the same everywhere and no one can get away from their own destiny, even in a car.” In Stone Upon Stone, Myśliwski has created a breathing monument to language, to the power of oral storytelling as a lived art. After Szymek meets the parents of his true love for the first time, her father tells the girl, “Listen, do you know who Eagle was?” and then goes on to recount what he knows of Szymek’s heroic wartime legacy. “Here Eagle disarmed so-and-so, there he led an attack, here he set up an ambush, there he was surrounded but he got away. He just confirmed every once in a while that that was how it had been. That’s how it was sir, am I right? And though in some cases it was completely different, I just nodded, because the way he told it was truer than it actually was.”
There’s no irony lost here on the fact that this oral telling is in written form, since part of what the book represents is a lament to a dying peasant way of life; as illiteracy in the countryside diminishes with the coming of economic and technological progress, so does the reliance on one’s memory to pass on stories from generation to generation, the bedrock of a lively oral tradition and folk literature:

And what if along with the people the dogs and cats went quiet, and all the other animals, and the birds stopped chirping and the frogs stopped croaking. Would there be a world? Even trees talk if you actually listen to them. Each kind has
its own language, the oaks speak oak, the beech trees speak beech. Rivers talk, corn. The whole world is one big language. If you really listened carefully to it, you might even be able to hear what they were saying a century back, maybe even thousands of years ago. Because words don’t know death. They’re like seethrough birds, once they’ve spoken they circle over us forever, it’s just that we don’t hear them.

Dualisms are woven throughout this work of life as memory—life and death, earth and sky, land and God, godlessness and faith—pulling our consciousness forward, picking up various threads or tracks when the narrative shifts course, the way minds tend to do. This representation of consciousness and speech is reminiscent of Beckett, though Myśliwski convincingly demonstrates a greater faith in nature and tradition, language and the possibility of human connection. The fact that the novel makes you feel as if you’re in the actual presence of Szymek, who’s verbally recounting his life story to you, testifies to the talents of Myśliwski as well as to the translator of this masterwork, Bill Johnston.

Szymek’s own “gift of the gab” serves others throughout the novel in almost priest-like fashion. People would set their work aside to come hear his speeches during his three years as a wedding official, when even the open window would be “lined with people listening outside, like flowerpots.” In recollecting one speech that brought almost everyone to tears, containing a fable about a king unable to dream—“It was like he was only half living, he lived in the day but he died at night. Imagine dying like that for years and years, when even dying once is so hard”—he confesses, “Where I got it all from I have no idea.” And, later, while in the hospital, his narrative skill gives comfort to his dying neighbor. Szymek leads him with words, “the way you take a child’s hand to lead him across a footbridge over the river,” to a pastoral image of “lying on hay, in the meadow, by the river, in the shade of a tree,” to just “melt away in that noise, among the springs and the bees and the clouds and . . . be carried away by the tired, tired earth.” The novel is a hymn to life, and also an elegy.

Infinite Jest: A Review of Bacacay by Witold Gombrowicz
by Benjamin Paloff
January 6, 2005
The Nation

 

This past March, on the closing day of an international literary conference held in Krakow, Poland, an elderly woman stood up before hundreds of scholars and admirers gathered to mark the 100th birthday of Witold Gombrowicz and made a plucky confession that produced nervous titters around the regal lecture hall. She had read all of Gombrowicz’s works, she said, and hadn’t understood a word. She had read a great deal of the voluminous criticism about Gombrowicz, most of which is still produced in his native country, and hadn’t gotten anything out of that, either. And then, hoping for some clarification, she had listened patiently to more than seventy presentations at this weeklong conference, but to no avail. So, she asked, can anyone explain what the deal is with Witold Gombrowicz?

It’s a reasonable question, and even more so in North America, where this writer is better known by reputation than by his work. Gombrowicz, who died in France in 1969, was the author of stylistically innovative and philosophically challenging prose, and he has gradually slipped into the ranks of the cultural powerhouses of modern Europe. That is, Gombrowicz has become one of those names — like Robert Walser or Hermann Broch — usually incanted by those who are in the know to assert their intellectual superiority over those who are not.

Fortunately, help is on the way. Three new translations — the story collection Bacacay, the memoir Polish Memories and his self-descriptive Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes — not only fill in major gaps in Gombrowicz’s body of work in English; they provide hope that for the first time it may be possible for those lacking fluency in Polish to enjoy this singular talent for all that he is. Because great as Gombrowicz’s reputation has been among the anointed few, as loudly as his praises have been sung by the likes of Susan Sontag and John Updike, as much as the denizens of smoky art cafes have called him a forerunner of every current in twentieth-century thought, from existentialism to body theory, something has been missing from his Anglophone existence. Gombrowicz is all these things, but he is also something immeasurably greater: He is brilliantly, savagely funny — a philosophical, stylistic and comic genius in one.

Appropriately, Gombrowicz’s biography reads like one man’s meditation on history retold as a cruel joke. In the 1930s he made a name for himself in Poland by using his irreverent fiction to skewer his compatriots’ aristocratic pretensions, first in a collection of stories titled Recollections of Adolescence, and then in his 1937 masterpiece, Ferdydurke, whose idiosyncratic, rhythmic prose jumps nimbly between disparate registers of diction and emotion, producing an effect that is by turns hypnotic and unsettling. In 1939, already a rising literary star, Gombrowicz accepted an offer to sail to Argentina on the maiden voyage of a transatlantic ocean liner. Less than two weeks after his arrival in Buenos Aires, Germany invaded Poland, and Gombrowicz was stuck in South America, penniless, with barely a word of Spanish. To eke out a meager living, he had to rely on a community of Polish expatriates who tended to be even more conservative than the conservatives he’d gladly left behind in his native land. In 1953 Gombrowicz published Trans-Atlantyk, a blistering account of his first years in exile retold as a kind of Chaucerian farce. But this description is unlikely to resonate with readers whose sole contact with Gombrowicz is the novel’s uneven 1994 English translation, which inadvertently drained his prose of much of its wit and vigor.

Translation has been the greatest stumbling block in introducing Gombrowicz to an American audience. Gombrowicz is that rare writer in whom the weight of a powerful intellect is leavened by both linguistic daring and an infectious sense of whimsy. These latter two features have proven the most difficult to render in English. With the exception of Lillian Vallée’s translation of his fascinating (and largely fictitious) three-volume Diary, most English translations have been at least partially tone-deaf: They either fail to grasp the energy of his Polish (some have been done from French or German translations rather than the original Polish) or they fail to reproduce that artistry in our language. With the first complete translation of Bacacay — an expanded version of Recollections of Adolescence, published in 1957 — this major European talent is finally ours to enjoy.

Taken as a whole, the twelve stories in Bacacay read like a catalogue of tyranny in its gloriously variegated forms. In the first story, “Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer,” a well-to-do attorney tries to impose his sense of good manners on everyone around him, including the narrator. In “The Rat” a retired judge seeks out the perfect means of torture for a bandit who has brought too much “expansive exuberance” to the neighborhood. The protagonist of “Dinner at Countess Pavahoke’s,” who tells us at the outset that “I often spend long hours discussing beautiful and exalted topics,” is devastated when, instead of the refined company he expects, he finds himself at the Dinner Party from Hell. And in “Virginity” we encounter Alice, who requires constant vigilance to preserve her delicate, maidenly nature:

The life of an adolescent girl can be compared neither with the life of an engineer or lawyer, nor with the life of a housewife and mother. Take, for instance, the longing and murmuring of the blood, perpetual as the ticking of a watch. Somewhere the idea was already once expressed that there is nothing stranger than being alluring. It’s not easy to look after a being whose reason for existing is to entice; yet Alice was well-protected by her canary Fifi, by her mother, the major’s wife, and by her Doberman pinscher Bibi, whom she led on a leash during their afternoon walk. These domestic animals had a curious understanding when it came to Alice’s protection. “Bibi,” sang the canary, “Bibi, you sweet dog, guard our young lady well. Bow and scrape to her! Bow and scrape! And drive away bad thoughts. Keep an eye on the parasol — it’s so lazy; make sure it shields our beloved young lady from the sun!” Tyranny permeates these stories, a thread that would run through al of Gombrowicz’s work. Lambasted by conservative critics for the supposed “immaturity” of these stories, he went on to write Ferdydurke, which depicts the identity crisis of an author who, lambasted for the “immaturity” of his first book, is abducted by his old schoolmaster and whisked away to the classroom, where he must relive all the shamefulness of adolescence. For Gombrowicz, tyranny plagues every human interaction: What we call “culture” itself amounts to a tyranny of the majority (an Enlightenment fear now taken oddly as a mark of political good fortune). Even when we are alone, tyranny is with us, in our bodies, our desires, in our inability to escape from ourselves.

More than a half-century before the humiliation-driven humor of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, Gombrowicz explored the ways in which being asked to behave creates an irrepressible need to misbehave. In “The Banquet” the ministers of state are dumbfounded not only by the king’s corruption (Who is ever really dumbfounded by the king’s corruption?) but by his wanton assault on propriety:

No less than a bribe was being demanded by the bribe-taker in the crown in return for his participation in the banquet. And all at once the king began to complain that these were hard times, that it wasn’t clear how one could make ends meet…after which he giggled…he giggled and winked confidentially at the chancellor and minister of state…he winked and then giggled again…he giggled and poked him in the side with his finger.

The fun of Bacacay — and it is not merely a pleasure, but fun — is in watching how these tyrannies fold back into and against themselves. The maidenly Alice is overcome by a need to crouch down next to a stray dog and gnaw at a bone. The hero of “Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer” turns the tables on the snooty attorney, inserting himself into his life, interfering whenever possible in his walks and his love affair, even paying for his daily pastries in advance as an assault on his independence, explaining to us by way of analogy: “Imagine the lawyer coming out of a public lavatory, reaching for fifteen groszy, and being told that it had already been paid. What does he feel at such a moment?”

In this regard, those who have described Gombrowicz’s writing as “absurdist” have shot wide of the mark. His ideas are strikingly consistent, and their consequences deadly serious, even if his chosen mode of expression is anything but solemn. As Gombrowicz puts it in Polish Memories, “It’s possible to be perfectly aware of all the worthlessness of our inflammable credulity, and also of the utter severity of life, and at the same time to hold firmly to what one considers to be important values.”

Given his fondness for adopting masks and playing the spoiler even in his “nonfiction” works, Polish Memories features some of the author’s most direct, unadulterated comments on life and literature before the war forced him into exile. “Adulteration” is one of the hallmarks of Gombrowicz’s work, and admirers of his boisterous style will be disappointed by the sober, judicious prose of these autobiographical sketches, composed in the late 1950s for Radio Free Europe. At the same time, readers unfamiliar with Polish cultural history may find themselves lost in a sea of names of poets and politicians and the cafes they frequented. Still, Polish Memories merits a place among those easily overlooked books that glow ever brighter the more the reader brings to the table. It will be most enjoyable for those who have read Gombrowicz’s fiction, and who will appreciate his euphoria when Ferdydurke was praised by his friend the lyrical short-story writer and artist Bruno Schulz, who earlier had been lukewarm to the project: “A miracle occurred,” Gombrowicz writes. “In the course of a single day I received several telegrams from him — because as he read, he kept running to the post office to send me new compliments.” But the book also has a great deal to offer anyone who shares his loathing of cultural self-importance and aristocratic vanity. “When your neighbors religiously show you the signet ring of their great-grandfather,” he remarks, “you can assume that in the present day the family has gone to the dogs, since they’re so impressed by the past.”

Bill Johnston, a veteran translator of Polish literature, has faithfully rendered both Bacacay and Polish Memories into English. This is an accomplishment in itself, especially in the case of Bacacay, in which Gombrowicz jumps quickly from the pinched tones of lords and ladies to the frenetic pace of narrators on the verge of mental and physical collapse. One occasionally wishes that Johnston had been bolder in reproducing the linguistic playfulness of Gombrowicz’s stories, since the prose here sometimes sounds too much like that of the deliberately straightforward Polish Memories. Such quibbles aside, this version of Bacacay nevertheless raises the bar for all Gombrowicz translations and makes an excellent introduction for readers new to his tragicomic world.

A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes is an entirely different kind of text — call it Advanced Gombrowicz — and we should pity the poor soul who stumbles upon this slim volume while looking for a Cliffs Notes summary to Western thought. Never intended for publication, the book consists of notes Gombrowicz wrote in French during the last year of his life at the request of his wife and of his close friend, the journalist Dominique de Roux, who hoped to distract him from his progressing illness and thoughts of suicide. In this able translation by Benjamin Ivry, we see Gombrowicz musing on some of Europe’s major philosophers, among them Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger and Marx. Originally composed for two intelligent nonspecialists, these reflections reveal, not surprisingly, more about their author than about his subjects. His interpretations are, to say the least, idiosyncratic. He writes, for instance, that Schopenhauer is not a pessimist but that he simply has “a grandiose and tragic vision, which, unfortunately, coincides perfectly with reality,” and that “our will to live forces us to consume others or to be consumed by them.” (What would a real
pessimist be, one wonders.) Nietzsche, he declares, has “the nerves of Shelley, the stomach of Carlyle, and the soul of a young lady.” Then again, he also warns us, “To tell the truth, in philosophy, one cannot say anything.”

Even this admission, however, should be taken with a grain of salt. Not because Gombrowicz necessarily believes that one can say things in philosophy but because most of his work suggests that “to tell the truth” is an impossibility in itself. For this master of fiction and semi-fiction, history, culture and personal interactions elude our convenient definitions, and thank heavens, since life is difficult enough without somebody else telling us who we are and what we mean.

The publication of these three books helps mark 2004 as “The Year of Gombrowicz,” as it was officially designated by the Polish government. The international conference held last March in Krakow was the largest of several such gatherings in Poland, France and the United States. But the idea of an international conference honoring Gombrowicz is ironic, even oxymoronic, since the author openly ridiculed the worship of cultural greatness. Hour after hour, translators and editors heaped praises on him, and scholars (myself included) stimulated each other’s minds with various attempts to dissect his work. But the most fitting tribute to Gombrowicz was paid by the brave woman who stood up when all was said and done and confessed to her own incurable incomprehension. She was reminding us that, with the Polish master, nothing is definite or explicable, let alone sacred. Try as we might to arbitrate worldly meaning, whether through exclusionary jargon, demonstrations of good taste or appeals to “moral values,” the joke is always on us.

TLS May 20, 2011

 

A gate in the field

By Benjamin Paloff

Wieslaw Mysliwski

Stone Upon Stone

Translated by Bill Johnston

 

In his native Poland, the distinguished career of Wiesław Myśliwski dates back to the 1960s. He is not well known in he world of English letters, however, and Stone Upon Stone, the second of his books to be translated into English in the past twenty years, looks dauntingly big in this edition. Yet the reader who moves past these discouragements will discover a marvel of narrative seduction, a rare double masterpiece of storytelling and translation.

 

The story is simple enough. Szymek Pietruszka, an ageing, average Jozef who serves as both narrator and protagonist, has decided to have a tomb built for his family, himself included. But Szymek’s calculations of how much space is needed to accommodate the remains of everyone who will rest there become a rangy meditation on what remains after it. One brief reflection spins off the next in an infinite regress, so that we gradually come to see the construction of the tomb as more than just one stone on another.

 

Myśliwski’s prose, replete with wit and an almost casual intensity, skips nimbly from one emotional register to the next carrying a dramatic force far beyond the little that actually transpires in the course of the novel. In this he invites comparisons to other Central European masters of digression, such as Jaroslav Hasek or Bohumil Hrabal, thoughMyśliwski’s affective repertoire is far broader than Hasek’s, and his anecdotes weave together on a much larger scale than Hrabal ever produced. Like Hasek and Hrabal, Myśliwski regales us with a motley parade of his hero’s vocations and avocations over the course of a lifetime, from farmer to soldier to resistance fighter to policeman to bureaucrat and back to farmer. His sustained passions are dancing with women, getting into brawls – “A real church fair is either when the bishop comes, or there’s a fight” – and cutting hair, which in fact makes Szymek the closest thing this novel has to a novelist. “You don’t go to the barber just to get your hair cut or get a shave.”, he informs us, “you go to sit and have a chat and listen to stories.”

 

In his translation Bill Johnston navigates Myśliwski’s modulations with skill and the lightness of touch that is generally the face of profound labor. Over nine long, meandering, hypnotic chapters, the text comes to resemble the sprawling farmland where Szymek spends his days, the only place he believes where his labours in this life can have any lasting value. Unlike his three brothers, all of whom drift off “away” or “there” – that is, to the city, where modernity has long since forgotten village life – Szymek believes that sticking to the land affords more contact with the eternal than one might find in God, country, or Communism, none of which gives back as much as it takes. Not above poking a little fun at his reader, Mysliwski also has Szymek wonder why anyone would bother with so many words:

 

You read and you read and you read, and in

the end it all went into the ground with you anyway.

With the land it was another matter. You worked and

worked the land, but the land remained after-wards.

With reading, not even a line, not a single word, was

left behind.

 

Szymek’s penchant for elaborate metaphors – “The moon was like a cow’s udder, if

You’d pull its teats we’d have been covered in streams of moonlight” – brightens his tales of battle, feuding neighbors, family disintegration and lost love. Even his portrayal of the many deaths here, which are frequent and often brutal, tends towards a grotesque levity. This may be Myśliwski’s most consistently gratifying accomplishment: he manages tone so finely, orchestrating a perfect continuity between the tragic and the comic and, ultimately, between life and death. As Szymek tells us, on one of the occasions he has been shot: “I didn’t know which world to believe in, this one or the next. Truth be told, I didn’t really feel much like coming back to this world. But the next one just seemed a continuation of this one . . . . I felt like I’d died in the next world and come to this one to live”. If life has taught Szymek anything, it is that building a tomb is no different from building a home. Late in the novel, he even contemplates furnishing his tomb with a gateway, similar to the one that used to belong to an old manor house, though the fence itself has gone: “The gate is actually still standing today, except it’s in the middle of fields and it doesn’t lead anywhere”. He might be talking about death, and in a sense he is. But he is also just mentioning a rusty old gate.

 

Review of Contemporary Fiction

2004

Wyatt Mason’s translation of Eric Chevillard’s third novel Palafox elegantly captures the style of whimsy of the French original. Sentences caper musically to intricate patterns of wordplay and shifting, characterized narration from the first hatching of the title creature Palafox. With the aid of four scientists, Palafox’s adoptive family attempts to keep the creature as pet and performing attraction. While the scientists fail to define him or predict his behavioral patterns, Palafox shifts between forms, ambiguously positioned between bird and fish, insect and mammal. He exists not as an embodied whole but in the shifting minutiae of his parts. Chevillard carefully catalogs the pieces of Palafox’s composition even as they contradict each other, for a fragmented, cubist vision that leaves the reader never fully able to envision the creature—instead he’s held together as a series of visceral fragments. Meanwhile each chapter turns on the meticulous description of process: either the scientific methods of the four experts, of that of Palafox’s daily life—his upkeep, his escapades, his environmental preferences, all dealt with in scenes of increasing absurdity. As the family becomes increasingly frustrated with Palafox’s ambiguity, their reactions become hostile, culminating in a stunning Palafox recipe section. Though Chevillard’s writing is often compared to Samuel Beckett, in Palafox it is more reminiscent of Julio Cort·zar’s absurd processes in Cronopios and Famas or Borges’s magical bestiary in The Book of Imaginary Beings. Indefinable and untamable, Palafox is an impossible pet even when on his best behavior; he remains a wild beast—wildest perhaps in his blurriness and uncertainty.

Review of A Treatise on Shelling Beans from the Znak Rights Frankfurt catalog