Back Reviews Reel: November 2016

After a one-novel stay in the Far East a three-book tour of Europe was on my review schedule of this month three years ago. My point of departure was seventeenth-century Japan where I joined a Catholic missionary from Portugal whose faith was put to an atrocious test in the classical novel Silence by Endō Shūsaku. From there I travelled to Ancient Greece, or rather to Anatolia, to witness the cruel fate of Cassandra by contemporary German writer Christa Wolf who couldn’t save Troy with her prophecies. In modern-day Ireland I met The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle when she learnt that her violent husband had been killed by the police and she was finally free to start a new life with their children. At last, I plunged into a French classic only loosely set in place and time that revolves around The Fig Tree by Françoise Xénakis.

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First published in 1966, Silence by Endō Shūsaku evokes Japan in the seventeenth century. Sebastian Rodrigues, a Catholic missionary from Portugal, lives in hiding because he is an illegal alien and his religion is forbidden. The mere possession of a Christian symbol like a crucifix or the picture of a saint, notably of mother Mary, makes the owner subject to terrible torture, even death. When Rodrigues is captured, the magistrate makes him witness the atrocities against Christians who have been found out, before he even asks him to apostatise. Since there’s nothing else that he can do for the Japanese martyrs, he implores God to interfere, to stop the suffering and to punish the infidels. Alas, the answer to his prayers is nothing but silence and he begins to waver in his faith…
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The Trojan seeress Cassandra by German writer Christa Wolf is an intelligent and unusually well-educated young woman. Unasked for, she tells people that their city is doomed, if they go to war, but just as usual they don’t believe her and call her crazy. Everybody knows that she has strange fits sometimes and they serve people as welcome excuse to remind her of her secondary role as a woman in patriarchal Trojan society and to reject her undesired, though far-sighted views. That she rebels against being denied freedom of speech and a say in politics makes the once favourite daughter of King Priam an outcast as well as subject to police surveillance. Not even becoming a priestess of Apollo can save her from losing ever more credibility. And thus fate takes its course.
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Paula Spencer is The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle. For nearly eighteen years, the Dubliner belonging to the lower working class has been living in constant terror of her violent husband who almost from the start beat all self-esteem out of her and thus slowly drove her into alcoholism. Still she had enough strength and presence of mind to throw him out of the house, when he was about to cross the one limit that the battered woman wouldn’t let him: turning his violence against their children. Only then, she learnt that she was perfectly able to take care of her family and feed them. A year later her husband is dead, shot by the police, and she can begin to digest what the man whom she loved and still loves did to her and she can finally deal with her alcoholism.
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The only living thing on the remote island where a man struggles desperately to survive the brutal treatment in the forced labour camp of an unspecified terror regime is The Fig Tree by Françoise Xénakis. Three years have passed since HE was deported and thinking of his woman living a good life in freedom helped him to stay alive in the hostile environment. Meanwhile, SHE tried everything in her power to get permission to visit him, but bureaucracy is strict and there’s always another piece of documentation missing. Thus, much of her life consists in waiting for the longed for news and she begins to make a patchwork blanket for her imprisoned man like any woman in her parts since times immemorial. She imagines their conversation when they meet again at last…
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