1 January - 31 December 2015
In a globalising world that urges the individual to adapt to ever more uniform standards, those who are different in any way are almost necessarily pushed into the role of the outsider, not to say the unwanted freak. Just as much as the different, the new and innovative is perceived as a potential danger. Therefore creators often have a difficult standing. Society favours thoughtless – brainless – “selfless” pawns who want whatever they get and like whatever is in fashion. The long novel The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand portrays a man whose creative force spurs him on against the current of the mediocre and praised mainstream. He knows who he is and what he wants. He doesn’t care what others think or do, even when he becomes the target of power-hungry begrudging schemers. He is simply indestructible, invulnerable, unstoppable.
... and an invitation to join.
Holly and Mistletoe
The workings of the mind are mysterious and our memory isn’t always very reliable, especially about childhood. Some people recall their early years vividly and in great detail, while others seem to remember hardly anything. Moreover, the bits and pieces that have lasted in our minds for many years often turn out to be shockingly incomplete, blurred or even alienated past the recognition of others who were present too. Some memories are so painful that they are downright repressed: access denied until… This is the experience that an ageing novelist makes in So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood by Patrick Modiano, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2014. When a man steps into his life to return his lost address book, he rouses the ghosts of childhood asking after a person whose long outdated number is in it.
A Boy and a Red Lama on the Diamond Way: Am Grischtdaag
(aus
Drauss un Deheem: 1891/1936)
Sis
Grischtdaag.
Die ganz Welt iwwer
Frei
die Leit sich sehr,
Un
alles is harrlich, as wann der Daag
Vom
Himmel gelosse waer.
Ich
hock allee in mei Zimmer
Un
denk so iwwer die Zeit -
Wie
der Geischt vun Grischt sich immer
Weider
un weider ausbreid:
Un
wie heit in yeder Famillye
Frehlich
un gutes Mut
In
die liewi aldi Heemet
Sich
widder versammle dutt.
Ach
widder deheem! Ach, Yammer! -
Net
all! Deel sin yo heit
Zu
weit vun uns ab zu kumme -
Fatt
in de Ewichkeit.
Net
all deheem! Verleicht awwer -
Unich
behaap's kann sei -
Im
Geischt sin mir all beisamme
Un griesse enanner uff's nei!
So
sin mir vereenicht widder -
Loss
die Zeit vergeb wiesie will;
Ich
drink eich ein Gruss, ihr Brieder!
Verwas
sitzt dir all so schtill?
Weit
ab - iwwer Barig un Valley,
Un
iwwer die Ewichkeit's Brick -
Vun
eich Brieder all, wie Geischdeschall
Kummt
mir Eier Gruss zerick.
(Charles)
Calvin Ziegler
(1854-1930) |
At Christmas
(from Outside and At Home: 1891/1936)
It's
Christmas.
The
whole world over
Everyone's
filled with love,
And
everything's joyful, as if the day
Was
given from above.
I sit
alone in my room
Thinking
about the times -
How the
spirit of Christ always
Wider
and wider shines.
And how
today all families
With
much happiness embrace
As they
gather once again
In the
dear old home place.
All
home again! Oh, not so! -
Not
all! Some today in reality
Are far
from us below -
Away in
eternity!
Not all
at home! Perhaps though -
And I
insist I knew -
In the
spirit we're all together
And
greet each other anew.
So we
are together again -
May the
time go as it will,
I drink
to you a toast, brothers!
Why do
you all sit so still?
Far
away - over valley and ridge,
And
over the eternal bridge -
From
you brothers, like a spiritual echo
Your
greeting returns below.
Original
Pennsylvania Dutch and English version retrieved from Poetry
Soup
|
Modern life in overcrowded cities estranges society ever more from its roots, be they natural, cultural or spiritual. The consequence is that many people are discontent although they have everything they could wish and hope for. They suffer feeling empty, lost and out of place. Looking for a way to salvation, some become easy prey for self-appointed preachers who offer ready-made instructions for everybody leading to quick as well as lasting peace of mind. Others are luckier. Fate pushes them into a situation that allows them to get back in touch with their souls and to restore their natural bond with the world. In Lake of Heaven by Ishimure Michiko the protagonist travels to the place where his late grandfather grew up to scatter his ashes over the old family grave and finds a fading world still in harmony with nature and local culture.
A Novel – Almost – Like A Fairy Tale: 
Espionage is a dangerous trade, especially in times of – hot or cold – war, but not everybody deliberately chooses to enter it. Sometimes, above all in novels, outsiders get mixed up in intelligence work more or less by accident like Graham Greene’s Jim Wormold, the Englishman living in Cuba before Fidel Castro, who is recruited as a spy against his will (»»» read my review of Our Man in Havana) or the middle-aged American protagonist of The Angry Hills by Leon Uris who at first doesn’t even know that Greek resistance against Nazi Germany and British Secret Service have chosen him as unsuspicious and ignorant courier. What starts for the “bread-and-butter” writer Mike Morrison as an innocent business trip to Greece to transfer family money to the USA just in time before war will prevent it turns into a flight from invading German troops and Nazi spies hunting after a sealed envelope containing secret information.
Life sometimes takes such amazing turns that, if they came into the mind of a writer, even the most daring among them might refrain from using them in a book because they seem just too far-fetched to make a realistic story. To a historical novel based on well-researched facts, however, they can give the magic touch of a fairy-tale come true as is the case with the book that I’m reviewing today. In the 1940s, an Austrian author of popular novels chose to base what was to be her last and most famous work on a true story from revolutionary France that ends on the Swedish throne. Désirée by Annemarie Selinko is the fictionalised account of the stunning fate of Désirée Clary that reminds of the story of Cinderella, but the silk merchant’s daughter from Marseille who was the first love of Napoleone Buonaparte and who eventually became Queen Desideria I of Sweden and Norway really existed.
Although many tried to establish objective criteria for beauty, the wisdom that “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” could never be defeated. Nonetheless, it would be too easy to leave it at beauty being a matter of personal taste because from the moment we are born we are exposed to the opinion of others and we can’t help internalising their standards. In Europe the ideal of a beautiful body often tends to be Nordic, i.e. since Roman times or even longer, fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes have a particular appeal to beholders. European discoverers and settlers carried this idea of human beauty into the New World and so the African American protagonist of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison learnt early to despise herself for her looks. She prays to God for blue eyes that will make her beautiful and happy, but of course, that’s not how it works. 
For Catholics this month started with two days dedicated to the commemoration of the dead, namely All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Not just during times of mourning, but also on Memorial Days, a special place to remember those who left for good can be a great consolation. Thus the habit of most civilisations to build cemeteries that, following regional, cultural and religious traditions, can be very different. They can be humble sites of recollection as well as pompous testimonials of wealth and glory both of those departed and of those bereaved. Americans in particular seem to like to “celebrate” the recently deceased in grand style and this gives morticians an important role in the funeral rites. The satirical novella The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh sets a love story against the backdrop of burials and cremations in two park-like cemeteries in Hollywood, one for humans and one for their pets. 
History is a matter of point of view. Despite dates and facts serving as cornerstones to reconstruct past events, our knowledge of times gone by is inevitably biased since it is always filtered by the historians who write it down according to their own backgrounds and interests. We never get a complete picture, we never know all sides to what happened. Thus especially the female dimension of history has been widely neglected, not to say passed over in silence for many centuries although there are traces of it to be found if thoroughly looked for. Historical fiction of merit and quality can help to bring back to light forgotten or misjudged women of the past. One such work is A Tale of False Fortunes by Enchi Fumiko that evokes the tragic events surrounding Fujiwara Teishi, the first consort of Emperor Ichijō, who lived in Japan in the late tenth century.
True love doesn’t take account of age, nor does it always strike the couple concerned like lightning as many romantic (and other) novels make believe. Often it develops almost unnoticed and between unlikely partners brought together not by a sudden flame of love, but because fate has it that they meet regularly over a long period of time. However thrilling it may be to plunge into a tale of all-consuming passion, I find it much more interesting to follow the emotions of two people who gradually take a strong liking to each other until they realise at last that they want to be with each other always. For this week’s review I picked a Japanese novel that tells such a slow-paced love story. In The Briefcase by Kawakami Hiromi a middle-aged woman “drifts” in love with her former high school teacher who is already in his seventies.Torre de Névoa
(de Livro
de Mágoas: 1919)
Subi ao alto, à minha Torre esguia,
Feita de fumo, névoas e luar,
E pus-me, comovida, a conversar
Com os poetas mortos, todo o dia.
Contei-lhes os meus sonhos, a alegria
Dos versos que são meus, do meu sonhar,
E todos os poetas, a chorar,
Responderam-me então: “Que fantasia,
Criança doida e crente! Nós também
Tivemos ilusões, como ninguém,
E tudo nos fugiu, tudo morreu!...”
Calaram-se os poetas, tristemente...
E é desde então que eu choro amargamente
Na minha Torre esguia junto ao Céu!...
Florbela Espanca
(1894-1930)
|
Tower of Mist
(from The Book of Sorrows: 1919)
I
climbed up high, to my slender tower,
Made of
smoke, mists and moonlight,
And,
moved, I set about conversing
With
the dead poets all day long.
I told
them my dreams, the joy
Of the
verses that are mine, of my dreaming,
And all
poets, crying,
Answered
me then, “What fantasy,
Crazy and
believing child! We too
Had illusions,
like nobody,
And everything
fled us, everything died!...”
The
poets became silent, sadly…
And it
is since then that I cry bitterly
In my slender
tower close to Heaven!...
Literal
translation by
Edith
LaGraziana 2015
|
According to an old and often quoted saying “Revenge is sweet”, but in reality it’s more likely that it’ll leave a rather bitter, not to say foul aftertaste. Moreover, the wish to restore justice taking revenge for endured suffering, damage or loss very easily becomes blind obsession that will inevitably end in disappointment after having caused pain or even ruin along the way. This is what the young protagonist of the short novel Little Apple by Prague-born Austrian writer Leo Perutz hasn’t yet learnt when he returns to his family in Vienna in autumn 1918. He survived the battlefields of World War I and two years in a Siberian prisoners-of-war camp, he isn’t able to close the chapter for good, though, because he vowed to take revenge for the humiliation, torment and terror that he and his comrades suffered from a sadistic camp commandant. Before long he sets out on a dangerous hunt through half of Europe.
A scene of war is a scaring and depressing place. Often no house remains intact, no field safely arable and it seems impossible that the old hustle and bustle of life can ever return. These days we see it in Syria and other regions less present in the media, but not so long ago great parts of Europe were in ruins. Certain areas of France and Belgium were destroyed twice within less than half a century! Today many of the battlefields – what a harmless sounding word compared to German “Schlachtfeld” that has slaughter in it! – are well-kept places of remembrance, while they were nothing but craters and rubble right after World War I and II. The English novel The Happy Foreigner by Enid Bagnold evokes the atmosphere of winter 1918/19, the first of peace after four years of carnage, through the eyes of a young woman driver in the service of the French army. 
The unexpected and sudden loss of a person close to us usually leaves us in a state of shock and disbelief, even more so when the cause of death happens to be suicide. In some cases friends and family might (just might) have had a chance to see it coming if they had paid more attention, while in other cases the reasons remain unexplained and mysterious, sometimes forever. In their grief many bereaved will start to ponder about what went wrong and what they could have done to prevent the fatal step. To come to terms with the void after his close friend and brother-in-law jumped off the roof of his office building in Tōkyō without a warning, the protagonist of The Changeling by Ōe Kenzaburō takes to conversing with him on the Other Side with the help of a stack of old-fashioned cassette tapes that the deceased recorded for him until shortly before his suicide.
News stories these days often evoke a world reminding of a fictitious dystopia although the facts behind them are terribly real. Bloody wars are raging, refugees are being treated worse than wild beasts or lepers, states are tightening control over individuals making ever-stricter laws for the sake of public security. Are we fooling ourselves when we call our society free and imbued with the spirit of universal human rights? And where is humanity going? Many novels show us nightmarish scenarios of the future as it might become if we aren’t on our guard. A more recent one of them is The Method by Juli Zeh set in a world where the state keeps individual health under surveillance and prohibits as well as punishes every potentially harmful behaviour on the pretext of protecting the population from illness and pain. The protagonist feels the full rigour of the system when she lets herself go and begins to question the METHOD.
There are books that everybody has at least heard of and that keep attracting readers throughout years, decades and in some cases even centuries, in short books that are timeless classics of literature. Undeniably, the slim volume that I picked for today’s review is such a classic or to be precise a modern classic since it first appeared only in 1958. I admit that Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote may owe part of its lasting notoriety and popularity to the fact that it was adapted for the screen as early as in 1961 starring Audrey Hepburn. For the rest, the novella is a brilliant portrait of a young woman who left behind a modest life somewhere at the back of beyond in order to enter well-to-do society of New York City and to get her share of glamour and happiness.
Since I joined the Japanese Literature Challenge 9 in June, I thought that it's time to review another book for it. I set my mind on a Japanese classic written by a woman and found that it isn’t easy to lay hands on one in translation. I tried to get a novel by Ariyoshi Sawako, but the Japanese publisher liquidated its English-language branch and the remaining stock seems to be sold out. Electronic versions of her books exist although I suspect that most of the files available are illegal copies if not part of schemes to spread malware. So I turned my attention towards another important female Japanese writer and I dug up Confessions of Love by Uno Chiyo. This bestselling novel from 1935 revolves around the amorous adventures of a painter passionately in love with a young girl whose upper-class family tries to keep them apart.
Foggy mornings and early dusk are an unmistakable sign that autumn is approaching once again. For me this means that it’s time to close My Reading Summer of Nordic White Nights after thirteen weeks of hopping criss-cross around the Arctic Circle. My last destination is Scandinavia, more precisely Sweden. The country has gained some notoriety as a hotbed for excellent mystery writers and also the author of the book that I’m reviewing today probably wouldn’t be as famous as he is, hadn’t he produced a series of popular crime novels starring Inspector Kurt Wallander. Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell, however, belongs to a different genre of fiction although like a thriller it largely revolves around death and ghosts of the past. It’s the story of a former surgeon whose secluded life is turned upside down when an old love turns up after almost forty years and asks him to keep a promise while it’s still time.Auch der andere, der bist du(aus Mein Lied: 1911)Was die Erde mir geliehen, Fordert sie schon jetzt zurück. Naht sich, mir vom Leib zu ziehen Sanft entwindend Stück für Stück. Um so mehr, als ich gelitten, Um so schöner ward die Welt. Seltsam, dass, was ich erstritten, Sachte aus der Hand mir fällt. Um so leichter, als ich werde, Um so schwerer trag' ich mich. Kannst du mich, du feuchte Erde, Nicht entbehren? frag' ich dich. "Nein, ich kann dich nicht entbehren, Muss aus dir ein' andern bauen, Muss aus dir ein' andern nähren, Soll sich auch die Welt anschauen. Doch getröste dich in Ruh'. Auch der andre, der bist du." Peter Rosegger (1843-1918) |
The Other, Too, Is You(from My Song: 1911)What once Earth to me presented She's already asking back; Comes to take what she had granted, Grasping tender speck by speck. Strange: the more of hurts I carried The more beauty showed the land; What I fought for, gains of merit, Softly falling from my hand. And the lighter I am getting, The more heavily I walk: 'Can't you, from your moistened setting, Spare me, Earth? I beg you, talk!' 'No, I cannot spare you, Brother, Need you for the other one; Out of you I'll feed the other: Let him also see the sun. But relax and do not rue: For the Other, too 'tis You!' unknown translator on PoemHunter.com |
