Category: German

German Literature Month: Alina Bronsky

20th November 2013 / / 8 Comments

Alina Bronsky, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (2010)
Translated from the German by Tim Mohr, 2011

abI would call this book delightful, but that doesn’t seem quite the right word for a novel with such a splendidly awful protagonist, and which actually carries quite a bitter sting. I was taken with The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine from the first two paragraphs, so perhaps I’ll quote those:

As my daughter Sulfia was explaining that she was pregnant but that she didn’t know by whom, I paid extra attention to my posture. I sat with my back perfectly straight and folded my hands elegantly in my lap.

Sulfia was sitting on a kitchen stool. Her shoulders were scrunched up and her eyes were red; instead of simply letting her tears flow she insisted on rubbing them into her face with the backs of her hands. This despite the fact that when she was still a child I had taught her how to cry without making herself look ugly, and how to smilr without promising too much.

This voice belongs to one Rosa Achmetowna; already we get a sense of the kind of person she is: concerned about how she appears (which must be proper), and possessed of a very low opinion of her daughter.

What we see shortly after is that Rosa will go to extraordinary lengths to achieve her goals, and that she’ll change her attitude in a heartbeat if it suits her. Her first reaction to Sulfia’s pregnancy is to try to stop it; her folk remedies don’t work, but a knitting needle does the trick – except it turns out that Sulfia had twins, and one of them comes to term. Rosa is horrified at the thought of Sulfia having a child – until little Aminat is born, and proves (unlike Sulfia) to share her grandmother’s Tartar features. Aminat promptly becomes the apple of Rosa’s eye, so much so that Rosa thinks the girl would be better off with her than Sulfia.

Much of the humour in Alina Bronksy’s book comes from seeing just how far Rosa is prepared to go. For example, when Rosa is casting about trying to find Sulfia a good husband, she learns of a German man in a coma who’s been brought into the hospital where Sulfia works (Dieter Rossmann; “What a nice name!” says Rosa), she sees her chance, even entertaining the thought that Sulfia could tell him when he wakes up that the two of them are in a relationship, in case he’s lost his memory. Rosa is even more delighted to discover that Dieter is a journalist researching Tartar cuisine – until she finds out that he cooks himself, at which point she wants nothing more to do with him. That changes again when the prospect arises of the family being invited to move to Germany, where Rosa thinks they’ll have a much better life.

Rosa has a very clear image of herself and her worth: she always thinks that she’s the best looking, the best dressed – better than those around her. How much of what she does is for the good of her family, and how much for her own self-worth, is open to question; the two are so bound up with each other that perhaps there is no difference in Rosa’s mind. The real sting of the novel comes from seeing how Rosa’s view of herself doesn’t always correspond with reality. When her family makes it to Germany, Rosa gets a job as a cleaner; she’s very pleased at this, and suddenly we experience the jolt of recognition that Rosa’s high opinion of herself may not be as high as we thought.

This feeling of dissonance returns – though developing more slowly, and with a more melancholic undertone – as Rosa grows older, and starts to lose her grip on the world around her. If she was out to improve her family’s lot in life – well, that’s happened in some ways, but not in others. If she was out to improve her own, I suppose that has also happened, if not quite in a way Rosa would have anticipated. In other words, the outcome is a typically bittersweet jumble of life – but the book that chronicles it is a joy. Bronsky has one other novel in English, Broken Glass Park; you can be sure that it’s on my to-read list.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of this book: Janet Potter for The Millions; Boston Bibliophile; Lizzy’s Literary Life; Leafing Through Life.

German Literature Month: Bernhard Schlink

14th November 2013 / / 3 Comments

Bernhard Schlink, Summer Lies (2010)
Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway, 2012

9781780220918I should say first of all that the only thing I knew about Bernhard Schlink prior to reading this story collection was that he wrote The Reader – and I haven’t read that novel, nor seen the film. So I came to Summer Lies pretty much cold.

I’d sum this book up as a collection of stories about loss. The protagonists tend to be middle-aged (usually men), generally successful, but often with the nagging sense that things are starting to slip (or have slipped) away. I like the title, Summer Lies, as a reflection of this: it could mean lies that last a golden season; or (and I don’t know if this pun works in the original German) that summer itself is lying – that the good things are not just transient, but in a sense were never really there at all.

I’m going to pick out two contrasting stories to illustrate Schlink’s approach. The writer protagonist of ‘The Night in Baden-Baden’ is either lying to himself or simply doesn’t care. As the story starts, he has taken Therese to Baden-Baden, to see the opening night of his first play. All well and good, except that Therese isn’t his girlfriend. His actual girlfriend, Anne, doesn’t like him seeing other women; he can’t understand why, and wonders why she doesn’t see that he’s bothered with all the travelling Anne does for her job as an academic. They’ve both chosen their paths in life, he reasons, so these are the consequences.

Our man is adept at justifying his actions to himself, and that includes withholding the truth from Anne (‘He wasn’t presenting anyone with a false picture.He was presenting sketches rather than pictures, and sketches aren’t false, because that’s all they are—sketches,’ p. 55). He’s not so good at comprehending why the two of them drift apart when Anne eventually finds out about Baden-Baden. Whatever he has lost by that happening… well, he’ll probably find something else to replace it. As a study of a quite obnoxious character, ‘The Night in Baden-Baden’ works well.

‘After the Season’ is the story of a holiday romance, a typical young lovers’ whirlwind – except these two are just either side of forty. Richard, a German flautist living in New York, meets Susan, a Los Angeles-based American who works for a theatre foundation. The pair bond over a shared love of music, and end up planning their future together, even though they know it can’t last.

Theirs is a romance born from the freedom of being away from their normal lives – so, when the time comes for them to return, the relationship can’t be sustained. Richard in particular doesn’t realise until that moment how much he is invested in his partnership with Susan; like the protagonist of ‘The Night in Baden-Baden’, he has either been fooling himself or willingly ignoring the truth – but, as he’s more open emotionally, Richard’s reaction is rather different. He is facing the sudden loss of summer, and is not prepared for the autumn.

Elsewhere
Read a story from the collection: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen’
Some other blogs on Summer Lies: Winstonsdad; Lizzy’s Literary Life; Julie Fisher for Bookmunch.

German Literature Month: Alissa Walser

6th November 2013 / / 5 Comments

Alissa Walser, Mesmerized (2010)
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch, 2012

This November, I am taking part in German Literature Month which is co-hosted by the blogs Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy’s Literary Life. As part of my efforts to read more works in translation, this seemed a good thing to get involved in; so I scoured my shelves for books originally written in German, and have three more lined up for the rest of the month. This first one, though, is a book I bought especially for German Lit Month, because it intrigued me when I saw it in the bookshop.

Mesmerized is a fictionalised account of Franz Mesmer’s attempts to restore the eyesight of Maria Theresia Paradis, the court secretary’s daughter, a musical prodigy in Mozart’s Vienna. Mesmer’s methods are controversial, but they do seem to have some effect on Maria’s blindness  – possibly, though, at the cost of her musical ability.

mesmerizedI’d describe Mesmerized as a novel of fragments. Alissa Walser’s prose (as translated by Jamie Bulloch) is full of sentence-fragments, which clump together like iron filings attracted to one of Mesmer’s magnets. Here, for instance, is Maria experiencing music:

Those notes. Which flew away before they had properly settled. Blended into each other. As if each note were too large for a single pitch. As if several chords were flowing out of the note and in all directions. A fading polyphony. Almost sad. Sadly excited. [p. 58]

This style mirrors the coming together of disparate elements to form an individual’s perception, the different senses which make up Maria’s experience of living. It also creates a constant feeling of unease and instability, that all these fragments could just scatter if whatever keeps them in place disappears. This is what Maria feels when she starts to struggle with her music; and there’s also a sense that treating her is the only thing holding together Mesmer’s life in Vienna. So one might say the two of them are pulling in different directions – and Walser leaves us wondering to the very end who will win out.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Mesmerized: Iris on Books; Erykah Brackenbury at For Books’ Sake; 50 Year Project.
A sample from the book.

Books in brief: Mid-March

19th March 2013 / / 1 Comment

Manisha Jolie Amin, Dancing to the Flute (2012). Kalu is a poor boy whose life is changed when a healer overhears him make music with a rolled-up leaf, and offers the boy an apprenticeship with his musician brother. Kalu learns to play the flute, which will eventually take him from around the world. Amin’s novel is a celebration of music, which changes Kalu in more ways than one. But it also keeps an eye on the people left behind in Kalu’s village, and shows how even apparently ordinary lives may be transformed.

And, if you’d like to win a copy of Dancing to the Flute and three other books by women writers, the publisher is running a competition:

Easter-Women-Comp

Pascal Garnier, The A26 (1999/2013). Translated from the French by Melanie Florence. As the modern world encroaches in the form of a motorway, a brother and sister cling to 1945 in their cottage. Bernard is terminally ill, and develops a taste for killing in his final days. Yolande just stays at home in her own little world. This is a nicely creepy novella that leaves you unsure how everything will end, but almost certain that it’s going to be bad.

Elizabeth Fremantle, Queen’s Gambit (2013). A novel about the final years of Katherine Parr, beginning shortly before she enters Henry VIII’s court, and chronicling her marriage to the king and affections for Thomas Seymour. Fremantle examines the place of women at court, finding both opportunity and restriction: Katherine’s maid, Dot Fownten, can move up in the world, even find love. Katherine also gains status as queen, power as regent, and can pursue projects such as religious reform – but, as a woman, there are still limits on what society considers acceptable from her.

W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe (1982). This is an odd book, especially if you come to it cold, like I did (I knew it inspired Field of Dreams, but have never seen that film). The protagonist, farmer Ray Kinsella, hears a voice saying, “If you build it, he will come”; this inspires him to construct a baseball field – which brings the legendary baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson back to life. Ray then persuades J.D. Salinger to join him on a road trip in search of other faces from the sport’s past. Possibly you need to be into baseball to fully appreciate the novel, but there is quite some charm in its willful and direct strangeness.

Susann Pásztor, A Fabulous Liar (2010/13). Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside. Joschi Molnár: raconteur, Holocaust survivor, late patriarch of a rather extensive family. On what would have been his hundredth birthday, various branches of Joschi’s family gather to work out just what may have been true out of all the stories he told about himself. Pásztor paints a careful portrait of a family forced to question even the most basic ‘facts’ they thought they knew, and examines the pros and cons of doing so.

Books in brief: early March

9th March 2013 / / 10 Comments

Lloyd Shepherd, The Poisoned Island (2013). Another Regency mystery for magistrate John Harriott and constable Charles Horton of the Thames river police, last seen in The English Monster. This time they’re investigating the strange deaths of crewmembers the Solander, recently returned from Tahiti, while an unidentified tree brought back on the ship grows rampant at Kew. As in the previous novel, there is an engaging subtext of transition and the tensions it brings – East London becoming a hub for trade; ideas of evidence-gathering changing the way crimes are investigated. The Poisoned Island is particularly alive to the fact that expeditions such as the Solander’s had a complex range of consequences, both positive and negative. Shepherd’s series is becoming something quite distinctive.

Birgit Vanderbeke, The Mussel Feast (1990/2013). Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. The new Peirene Press novella depicts a revolution in microcosm. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall, a family sits down to welcome the father home from his business trip with a large pot of mussels for dinner. But the preparation is a lot of work for the mother, considering that she doesn’t like mussels herself – and especially considering that the father doesn’t even come home. Especially in the beginning, Vanderbeke uses repetition to emphasise how the family have become trapped in the same thought patterns. As the book progresses, we learn more of the father’s hypocrisy and the hold he has over the rest of his household – then we start to see them break away. It’s a wonderfully controlled piece of writing.

Chris Paling, A Town by the Sea (2005). A man wakes up on the beach, and wanders through a strange town whose inhabitants he can barely understand, as we gradually piece together something of his history. The set-up is intriguing, but it becomes frustratingly difficult to arrive at a satisfactory interpretation (even an uncertain one) of what’s happening. My best guess is that our man is a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and his journey in the book is an externalised working-through of his feelings of dislocation from life. The novel can be nicely atmospheric, but ultimately I think it’s rather too nebulous.

Jonathan Pinnock, Dot Dash (2012). This is a collection of flash fiction (‘dots’) and longer stories (‘dashes’). What brings them together so well is Pinnock’s wry wit, his knack for sharp twists and rueful endings. The dots are marvellously concentrated bursts of language – not just punchlines, but stories reduced to their essence in a few sentences. Among the dashes, we find a harrowing tale of memory loss told in reverse; a street artist taking poetic revenge on a corporate boss; a girl who tries to bring Cairo to her dying grandmother’s bedroom; and more. Lovely stuff.

James Wheatley, Magnificent Joe (2013). In north-east England, Jim works as a labourer, his plans for university having been cut short when he was arrested as a teenager after a fight went too far. Now he’s working with his old school friends and living in his old village, with no apparent prospect of change. But Jim has also become friends with Joe, a fifty-year-old learning- disabled man – Jim gives Joe a helping hand, and Joe reminds Jim that there’s more to life than his immediate circle. The events of the novel will disrupt both of their lives profoundly: seeing events from Jim’s viewpoint perhaps dilutes some of the impact of what happens to Joe, but Wheatley paints an interesting portrait of a stable situation disintegrating despite the best attempts to hold it together. Magnificent Joe is its author’s first novel, and leaves me wondering where he might go next.

Sunday Salon: Ten Love Stories

10th February 2013 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been reading Marry Me, Dan Rhodes’s new collection of flash fiction on the theme of marriage. This being Rhodes, all is not exactly sweetness and light: in many of these stories, a male narrator is treated shabbily by his female partner – or occasionally he’s the one behaving shabbily himself – in absurd and darkly amusing ways.

‘Is there someone else?’ asks one man as his wife leaves him. ‘No,’ she replies, ‘there isn’t. But I would really, really like there to be’. Another woman informs her husband that he’ll have to leave, then produces a catalogue and sells him pots and pans for his new home (‘I would give you a discount because I know you, but it’s early days and I’m sure you’ll understand that I’ve got to keep a firm grip on my finances now I’m a single gal’). And so on, and so on, with these wonderfully barbed and pithy lines.

But, just occasionally. there are touches of real romance, as with the couple who put the lump of charcoal he gave her in lieu of a diamond under their mattress in the hope that pressure may transform it. The result: ‘it never looks any different. I think we would be a bit disappointed if it ever did.’ Moments like this bring light to the book, which ends up being quite sweet, in its own deliciously sour way.

***

As it’s nearly Valentine’s Day, I decided to go back through my blog archives and see how many love stories I’ve reviewed over the years. My instinct was that it wouldn’t be that many, but (allowing for my subjective interpretation), I’ve come up with a list of nine more books to add to the one above, which is more than I expected. Here they are – but I’m not necessarily promising happy endings…

Viola di Grado, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (reviewed Jan 2013)

A girl struggling to move on from her father’s death may have found a way forward when she meets a local boy who teaches her Chinese – if she can let herself move forward, that is. I really enjoyed this book, but it might as much an anti-love story as a love story.

Evan Mandery, Q: a Love Story (reviewed Sept 2012)

This must be a love story, because it says so in the title, right? Well, maybe not, as its protagonist receives repeated visits from his future self, trying to persuade him to call off his relationships. But the ending is actually rather affecting.

Alice Zeniter, Take This Man (reviewed May 2012)

A fine portrait of complex circumstances, as a young French-Algerian woman prepares to marry her Malian childhood friend in a bit to prevent his deportation. Not so much a tale of ‘will they?won’t they?’ as ‘should they? shouldn’t they?’.

Henry Green, Loving (reviewed Jan 2012)

A tale of love and contested space in a wartime country house. It begins and ends with the words of a fairytale, but that kind of happiness is a long way from being guaranteed.

Robert Shearman, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (reviewed Aug 2011)

An excellent set of stories examining love in its various manifestations.

Alison MacLeod, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction (reviewed July 2011)

Another fine set of stories about love.

Daniel Glattauer, Love Virtually (reviewed Feb 2011)

A novel told through two people’s emails; their correspondence becomes a form of courtship dance. Will they or won’t they? I don’t know without reading the sequel.

Priya Basil, The Obscure Logic of the Heart (reviewed June 2010)

A non-religious boy from a wealthy Kenyan Sikh family and a girl from a devout Birmingham Muslim family fall in love – and the complexities of their situation are very nicely delineated in the book.

Ronan O’Brien, Confessions of a Fallen Angel (reviewed Aug 2009)

The story of a young man who has apparently prophetic dreams of people’s deaths. I include it here for its wonderful portrait of falling in love twice, in two different ways – the dizzy rush of first love, and a slower flowering of affection later on in life.

Book notes: Richard Weihe and Robert Jackson Bennett

20th October 2012 / / 3 Comments

Richard Weihe, Sea of Ink (2003/12)
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

Peirene Press’s Year of the Small Epic has so far brought us a grand domestic drama and a study of bereavement. The series takes a lighter turn in its final instalment, with Swiss writer Richard Weihe’s fictionalised biography of the Chinese painter Bada Shanren. He is born Zhu Da, a scion of the Ming dynasty; but political change and his father’s death lead him to join a monastery and devote his life to art, going through many names before settling on Bada Shanren, ‘man on the mountain of the eight compass points’.

Sea of Ink has eleven illustrations of Bada’s beautiful paintings, and Weihe includes descriptions of how the artist worked, his brush strokes and hand movements. This has the striking effect of creating a detailed impression which remains just that – an impression. Even though we can see the final paintings, there’s room for our subjective interpretation of Weihe’s words. The novella itself works in a similar way, its short chapters acting like brush strokes to create a portrait of Bada’s life which is necessarily a fiction, a construct.

The ultimate story told in Sea of Ink seems to me one of a man finding peace in life through finding (or accepting) his place – finding the world in the marks of ink and brush. The tone of the writing is quiet and reflective; I’d say this is ideal reading for an autumn night.

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Troupe (2012)

Over the last few years, Robert Jackson Bennett has been crafting his own distinctive visions of the American fantastic’s iconic tropes. For his third novel, he turns his attention to the magical travelling show. We meet George Carole, a sixteen-year-old vaudeville pianist as he leaves his current job to visit the troupe of Hieronomo Silenius, whom George believes to be his father. Silenius’s reputation precedes him, but no one ever remembers the details of his show. When George watches a performance, he finds out why: the Silenius troupe plays an extraordinary song that make those who hear it forget what they’ve seen – but it doesn’t work on George.

Falling in with the troupe, George discovers that this music is pat of the ‘First Song’, the one that brought Creation into being; peforming it is the only thing that holds back the ‘wolves’ who would seek to devour reality. Silenius’s band go from place to place in search of fragments of the First Song, which only those of the Silenius blood-line can carry (the song didn’t work on George because he is of that line). So begins a journey into the world’s mythic spaces, with reality itself at stake.

Bennett achieves a nice balance between the personal and cosmic focus. All the members of Silenius’s troupe are pretending to be something they’re not, and the theme of escape runs through the novel – escaping the past, and escaping the inevitable. The ending makes use of a risky technique (I appreciate this is vague, but want to avoid a spoiler), but Bennett pulls it off. His body of work continues to intrigue, and I look forward to seeing what comes next.

Sunday Story Society: “Two Ways of Leaving” by Alois Hotschnig

16th September 2012 / / 8 Comments

Today we have our first story in translation: “Two Ways of Leaving” by Alois Hotschnig (translated from the Austrian German by Tess Lewis). You can read the story here at Untitled Books; you’ll also find it in Hotschnig’s Peirene Press collection Maybe This Time.

First, I’ll link to some reviews of Maybe This Time (not of all of which touch on this particular story): 1streading; Chasing Bawa; Olivia Heal; Andrew Blackman; Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat; The Worm Hole; The Arts Fuse. I’ll also point out this interview with the translator, Tess Lewis, at Love German Books.

Now, something different. I’m going to post some questions as ‘conversation starters’; feel free to answer them or not (I want them to act as jumping-off points, not to strictly define the discussion), or ask questions of your own. Here we go:

Conversation Starters

There’s no small amount of ambiguity in “Two Ways of Leaving”, so I’d be interested to know how you interpret the relationship between the ‘he’ and ‘she’ of the story.

My abiding thought when I finished Maybe This Time was that Hotschnig’s protagonists were caught up in other people’s stories. Would you agree with that in relation to “Two Ways of Leaving”?

Though it relates to a different piece in Maybe This Time, I was struck by 1streading‘s comment that “Hotschnig is playing with the use of the pronoun ‘he’ as a ‘character’”. What does the author do with the pronoun ‘he’ in this story?

Next time: On 30 Sept, we’ll be talking about the story “Drifting House” by Krys Lee.

For now, though, it’s over to you. What did you make of “Two Ways of Leaving”?

Book notes: Politycki, Skloot, Langford & Grant

24th February 2011 /

Matthias Politycki, Next World Novella (2009/11)

Matthias Politycki’s Next World Novella (translated from the German by Anthea Bell) is the latest title from Peirene Press, which would be enough on its own to interest me in reading the book, as I’ve enjoyed all their previous selections. Add to this that it’s a tale with shifting realities, and my interest only increases. Having read it now, though, it didn’t quite work for me, and I’m not sure I can put my finger on why.

Academic Hinrich Schepp finds that his wife Doro has died at her desk, where she has apparently been editing the attempt at a novel that he abandoned years before. Reading the manuscript, Schepp discovers that Doro’s edits constitute a commentary on their marriage, and that his wife was far from as content as he’d assumed.

The beginning of Next World Novella is especially potent, as the reader is a fraction behind Schepp in realising that Doro has died, and anticipates the jolt which is to come. There’s also effective interplay between the gradual unfurling of Doro’s true feelings and Schepp’s inability/reluctance to perceive the truth (e.g. he refuses to acknowledge the extent to which his abandoned novel reflected his own life). Yet I finished the book feeling that I hadn’t quite grasped something about it, and I can’t put into words what that might be. Next World Novella is well worth a look, though.

Interview with Matthias Politycki (Worlds Without Borders)
Next World Novella elsewhere: Just William’s Luck; Cardigangirlverity; The Independent.

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)

A brilliant fusion of biography, social history, and history of science, that tells a fascinating story. Henrietta Lacks was a poor African American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951; as with other cancer patients at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, a sample of the cells from Henrietta’s tumour was taken, without her knowledge, for research purposes. Those cells were the origin of the HeLa cell line, the first human one to be propagated successfully in the lab (‘immortal’ because they can divide indefinitely in culture). Henrietta’s cells facilitated many medical advances, but it was twenty years before her family even learnt that a sample had been taken.

Remarkable as this story is, it is Skloot’s treatment of it that makes The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. She moves back and forth between time periods and perspectives, weaving together details  of Henrietta’s and her family’s lives; the wider social and scientific contexts; the ethical issues raised by Henrietta’s story; and Skloot’s own experiences meeting and interviewing the Lacks family. There’s great breadth to the material, and Skloot’s control of it is superb. What an engrossing read.

Rebecca Skloot’s website
Interview with Skloot (Wellcome Trust)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks elsewhere: SomeBeans; Savidge Reads; Take Me Away; Lovely Treez Reads.

David Langford and John Grant, Earthdoom! (1987/2003)

A gloriously over-the-top spoof disaster novel featuring all manner of world-ending phenomena which appear on the scene in quick succession: a spacecraft on a collision course with Earth; an antimatter comet on a collision course with Earth; invading aliens; rabid lemmings; the Loch Ness Monster; a time-travelling Hitler who takes advantage of the handy cloning technology he finds on a Devon farm; sentient superglue… You get the idea.

Langford and Grant relentlessly send up the conventions of the disaster novel, with their cast of gung-ho male scientists and impossibly-attractive-yet-brilliant-except-when-the-guys-need-to-show-how-much-better-they-are female scientists; the plot contrivances which are eventually abandoned altogether when it suits; the characters’ helpful-for-the-reader recapping things they already know; and the prose. For example:

Jeb’s [the Devonian farmer] words rang hollow in his ears, not merely because in these grim days his accent was failing to convince even himself. Ambledyke Farmhouse was sealed against the horrors outside, its boarded-up windows blind as proofreaders’ eyyes. The inner dimness throbbed with a stench of ancient, decaying pizza. (p. 121)

Great stuff.

David Langford’s website
John Grant’s website

Book notes: Caldwell, Delius, Harrison

16th February 2011 / / 4 Comments

Lucy Caldwell, The Meeting Point (2011)

Euan Armstrong takes his young family to Bahrain, ostensibly to undertake missionary work; but Euan’s wife Ruth begins to question all that she holds dear when she discovers the true nature of that work. Meanwhile, teenage Noor Hussain has returned to Bahrain from England to live with her father; she has struggled to fit in and is contemplating suicide. But then Noor finds new hope in the person of Ruth, just as Ruth is falling for Noor’s brother Farid.

There are times, particularly towards the beginning, when Caldwell’s description feels over-egged; but The Meeting Point ultimately succeeds because of the elegance with which it portrays its central dynamic. Both Ruth and Noor have unrealistic desires which will inevitably lead them to clash; the progression of those events is thoroughly credible. Caldwell also draws her protagonists deftly; there’s a nice contrast between the broad strokes of Noor’s teenage impulsiveness, and Ruth’s more measured personality. All in all, The Meeting Point is a well-wrought novel that’s very much worth reading.

Lucy Caldwell’s website

Friedrich Christian Delius, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman (2006/10)

Another fine novella from Peirene Press, this one translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Margherita is a young German woman who came to Rome to be with her soldier husband Gert, only for him shortly after to be sent to Africa in the aftermath of El Alamein. Now, in 1943, she is alone in Rome, unable to speak Italian, but grateful for the small German enclave which surrounds her. We follow Margherita as she makes her way to a Bach concert, and reflects on her situation.

At a structural level, Portrait of the Mother is masterful, as its 117 pages comprise a single sentence. The affect of this is of a constant unspooling of thought and detail, with certain ideas recurring throughout. Delius captures particularly well Margherita’s naivety, and the irony underpinning it: insulated as she is her little bubble, she can’t comprehend the difficulties faced by ordinary Roman citizens; she’s sure that everything will be fine with Gert, just as she is sure that Rome would never be a target for bombing… Delius’s Portrait is a sharp character study.

M. John Harrison, The Ice Monkey (1983)

One of my reading resolutions for this year is to get around to reading something by M. John Harrison, who has been on my TBR list for rather longer than I’d have liked. I decided to start with collection of seven short stories, which has proven very interesting to read.

The title story sees Harrison’s narrator, Spider, who takes his friend Jones to visit the latter’s estranged ex-wife, Maureen – it doesn’t go well. Later, Jones and Spider go climbing on Ben Nevis, and that ends in tragedy. This piece sets a certain tone that carries through much of the rest of the anthology – many characters have similarly broken lives, for example – but there’s also continuity at a deeper, more structural level. The ending of ‘The Ice Monkey’ reads to me like a formal parody of a horror story, as it goes through the motions of hinting at a supernatural agency without actually doing so with any conviction – as though to emphasise that the mess-ups in the story have very human and natural causes, and there is no escape into the possibility of ‘magic’.

A deliberate turning-away from the fantastic seems integral to the affect of Harrison’s stories, here, as rituals and other strange happenings remain as mysterious to reader and characters alike at the end of a piece as they were at the beginning. In that respect, I’m reminded of when, last year, I read Scarlett Thomas’s Our Tragic Universe, whose aesthetic is also ‘anti-explanatory’ – though I find Harrison’s tales embody their aesthetic  more thoroughly.

The Ice Monkey is perhaps best summed up for me by its final sentences. In the closing story, ‘Egnaro’ is the name of a secret place which is heard fleetingly by various of its characters. Where other tales might uncover the truth of that place, Egnaro remains no more than a whisper’ As the story’s narrator remarks:

The secret is meaningless before you know it: and…worthless when you do. If Egnaro is the substrate of mystery which underlies all daily life, then the reciprocal of this is also true, and it is the exact dead point of ordinariness which lies beneath every mystery. (p. 144)

My key lasting impression of the stories in The Ice Monkey is that they highlight such ordinariness. Now I look forward to reading Harrison’s Viriconium, to find out if that impression will remain.

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