Poetry Revisited: Temps Perdu

(1931)

I never may turn the loop of a road 

Where sudden, ahead, the sea is Iying, 

But my heart drags down with an ancient load- 

My heart, that a second before was flying. 

I never behold the quivering rain- 

And sweeter the rain than a lover to me- 

But my heart is wild in my breast with pain; 

My heart, that was tapping contentedly. 

There's never a rose spreads new at my door 

Nor a strange bird crosses the moon at night 

But I know I have known its beauty before, 

And a terrible sorrow along with the sight. 

The look of a laurel tree birthed for May 

Or a sycamore bared for a new November 

Is as old and as sad as my furtherest day- 

What is it, what is it, I almost remember?

                                            Dorothy Parker
                                             (1893 - 1967)

Book Review: Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

November is a month of commemoration: All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, “Kristallnacht” Memorial Day, Armistice Day, Veterans’ Day, Remembrance Day. At least in my Central European corner death and war are a quasi-omnipresent theme at this time of year. As you may have noticed by now, I joined into the contemplative, even melancholy mood. I gladly do this because I believe that in our modern and fast-paced era we tend to forget that life is finite by nature and that our history is paved with senseless slaughtering. Today, however, I decided to give you a bit of a break and to approach death from a humorous side. I think that Memento Mori by Muriel Spark is just the right choice. 

Dame Muriel Spark was born as Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, Scotland/U.K., in February 1918. Until after World War II she led the life of an English teacher, secretary, intelligence officer, wife and mother. Then she dedicated herself to a literary career starting as a poet, critic and editor at first. Encouraged by her conversion to Roman Catholicism as well as by the fellow authors Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, she ventured at her debut novel, The Comforters, which was published in 1957. Over the following five decades the writer produced a great number of successful novels along with short stories. Her most famous works are Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1962), The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), The Public Image (1968), The Driver’s Seat (1970), Loitering with Intent (1981), A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), and The Finishing School (2004). After an interim of several years in New York, USA, the author settled in Italy in the late 1960s. Dame Muriel Spark died in Florence, Italy, in April 2006.

The plot of Memento Mori revolves around a circle of Londoners in their seventies and eighties who have known each other for ages, most of them well-to-do and suffering to different degrees from the common afflictions of advanced age. One after another receives anonymous telephone calls which account for the novel’s unusual title. The Latin phrase “memento mori” is generally translated as “remember you must die”, the sentence which the mysterious strangers pass on to their elderly targets. Each one of the protagonists reacts differently to those calls. Dame Lettie Colston understands them as an immediate threat for her life and during the course of the novel the charity lady with a cold heart becomes increasingly paranoid. For her brother Godfrey the calls are little more than a good reason to grumble and make accusations, while his wife Charmian, a once famous novelist seeing a revival of her work, takes them easy. On one occasion she answers the anonymous caller:

“… for the past thirty years and more I have thought of it from time to time. My memory is failing in certain respects. I am gone eighty-six. But somehow I do not forget my death, whenever that will be.” 

Charmian Colston’s former servant and companion Jean Tayler lives in the geriatric ward of a hospital among other “grannies” more or less confined to bed and begins to meditate on death when she hears about the calls. Alec Warner, her friend and almost fiancé of old times, on the other hand, observes the reactions of his peers with the precision of a scientist and records his findings. Others like Mrs. Pettigrew, who has been engaged to take care of Charmian Colston and who blackmails Godfrey, choose to simply ignore the calls. The retired police Inspector Henry Mortimer wonders whether it might not be Death himself calling, since he can’t make out the offender any more than his former colleagues. In fact, the callers are described differently by their victims as regards presumed age, social background, and even gender.

In Memento Mori Muriel Spark displays the whole range of human reactions to the fact of impending death from sheer terror over stubborn denial to patient expectation. Of course, the characters are exaggerated into types and yet as a reader I never got the impression that they were completely unrealistic. Quite on the contrary their idiosyncrasies adopted during a long life and two wars make them appear very human and give room for quite a number of funny turns despite the serious topic. Thanks to Muriel Spark’s economical language and simple style the novel is a pleasure to read. I didn’t even mind that the narrator ever again comments actions and thoughts as a nineteenth-century writer would have done.

Altogether Memento Mori by Muriel Spark is an exhilarating and amusing read with a critical undertone regarding our ways to deal with (or rather to push away) death and old age. My verdict: highly recommended!

Poetry Against War II: Old War-Dreams

(1865-66)

In midnight sleep of many a face of anguish,
Of the look at first of the mortally wounded, (of that indescribable look,)
Of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide,
          I dream, I dream, I dream.

Of scenes of Nature, fields and mountains,
Of skies so beauteous after a storm, and at night the moon so unearthly bright,
Shining sweetly, shining down, where we dig the trenches and gather the heaps,
          I dream, I dream, I dream.

Long have they pass’d, faces and trenches and fields,
Where through the carnage I moved with a callous composure, or away from the fallen,
Onward I sped at the time – but now of their forms at night,
          I dream, I dream, I dream.

                                                                                                            Walt Whitman
                                                                                                             (1819-1892)

Book Review: The Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque

During World War II Portugal was for many the last stronghold of peace and freedom in Europe, moreover one situated at the Atlantic Ocean. It’s no wonder that the country, although under the terror regime of António de Oliveira Salazar at the time, attracted countless refugees from the war-torn and Nazi-infested continent. The harbours must have been crammed with all the desperate trying to escape to America or any other place abroad presumed safe though known to be unwilling to let them in. In The Night in Lisbon Erich Maria Remarque (who fled to the USA too) lets one of those driven by fate seeking salvation in Lisbon tell his story to a fellow-sufferer.

Erich Maria Remarque was born as Erich Paul Remark in Osnabrück, Germany, in June 1899. He studied to become a teacher when World War I broke out in 1914 and he was drafted into the army. After the war, in 1920, his first novel titled The Dream Room (Die Traumbude) was published. His most famous novel up to this day is All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) which was first released as a book in 1929 and earned him a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Peace 1931. In 1933 Remarque’s books were banned and publicly burnt in Germany. Exiled first in Switzerland and as from 1939 in the USA he continued his career. In 1945 the best-selling novel Arch of Triumph (Arc de Triomphe) came out in English first. The Night in Lisbon (Die Nacht von Lissabon) appeared in 1962 and is the writer’s last finished novel. Erich Maria Remarque died in Locarno, Switzerland, in September 1970.

As the title suggests, The Night in Lisbon is set in the Portuguese capital, but its major part is taken up by a story within the story of a refugee with false identity who doesn't trust his memory and tells the first-person narrator about his and his late wife’s flight through Europe. The time period is before and during World War II when many citizens from areas under Nazi-German control or influence did everything in their power to escape from persecution and terror. The man who asks the narrator to stay with him during the night and to listen to his story in return for – saving – two ship tickets to the USA is a critical journalist from Osnabrück who after having been denounced by his Nazi brother-in-law Georg and detained in a concentration camp for a while fled to France in 1934. For five years he lived as an illegal alien, but then he inherited valid papers from another refugee known under the name Josef Schwartz. This gave him the (risky) opportunity to return to Germany and see his wife Helen. After only one night it was time for him to leave again because it was too dangerous in Osnabrück. Without even telling her husband, Helen decided to accompany him. They went to Switzerland first and moved on to Paris when Georg managed to trace them there. The beginning of the war in September 1939 put an end to their relatively happy existence. What followed were arrest, separation, detention camps and flight. With French police and Gestapo as a constant threat and Georg on their heels their odyssey brought them to Marseille. There Helen’s secret reasons to flee from the oppression of Nazi-ruled Germany as well as from her controlling brother Georg became so obvious that the husband could no longer ignore them. There Helen’s secret reasons to flee from the oppression of Nazi-ruled Germany as well as from her controlling brother Georg became so obvious that the husband could no longer ignore them. The following events which led to the murder of Georg drove the couple from Marseille and across the Spanish border in a hurry. Eventually they safely arrived in Lisbon, but for Helen the city of hope was the final destination.

The Night in Lisbon is a dense and easy-to-read novel which gives a gripping insight into the typical fate of refugees during World War II as the famous author himself experienced it to some extent. The whole novel is elaborate with a good flow and always to the point. Even the framing plot reflects the constant restlessness of people on the run, when the two men who made it to Lisbon are ever again driven away from a pub or bar at closing time and forced to find a new place to stay at for the rest of the night. The main story of the flight is a well-balanced series of dramatic events and their psychological effects on the protagonists, in brief the trying ups and downs of a life without a place or trustworthy people to resort to. All characters are nuanced and feel very authentic.

With thousands of people erring through the world in search of a safe place to settle down or just of a future worth living, Erich Maria Remarque’s The Night in Lisbon could hardly be more up-to-date. For us who we are living in countries which haven’t seen a war on their territories for many decades and which prosper despite all lamentations about the crisis, books like this are important to see how hard and shattering it is to be forced to leave your own country and not be welcome anywhere. It’s even worse if you need to fear for your life as the refugees of World War II. All things considered The Night in Lisbon is a very instructive and valuable read calling for humanity and understanding like all works of Erich Maria Remarque. I highly recommend this one.

Poetry Against War I: True Promises

(1918)

You promised War and Thunder and Romance.
You promised true, but we were very blind
And very young, and in our ignorance
We never called to mind
That truth is seldom kind.

You promised love, immortal as a star.
You promised true, yet how the truth can lie!
For now we grope for hands where no hands are,
And, deathless, still we cry,
Nor hope for a reply.

You promised harvest and a perfect yield.
You promised true, for on the harvest morn,
Behold a reaper strode across the field,
And man of woman born
Was gathered in as corn.

You promised honour and ordeal by flame.
You promised true. In joy we trembled lest
We should be found unworthy when it came;
But—oh—we never guessed
The fury of the test!

You promised friends and songs and festivals.
You promised true. Our friends, who still are young,
Assemble for their feasting in those halls
Where speaks no human tongue.
And thus our songs are sung.

                                                         Stella Benson
                                                         (1892-1933)                                                                                     

Book Review: Purge by Sofi Oksanen

Next stop on my tour of Europe: Estonia. The small country at the Baltic Sea, where the large majority speaks a language cognate to Finnish, seldom appears on international news. Independence of the Soviet Union dates back only to 1991 leaving apart a sovereign interlude between 1920 and 1939. All things considered it can’t be a surprise that most people including me know very little about this member state of the European Union. One of very few novels set in Estonia which I could find and which is available in English is Purge by the Finnish-Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen. 

Sofi Oksanen was born in Jyväskylä, Finland, in January 1977 to an Estonian mother and a Finnish father. She studied dramaturgy at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki and made her debut as a novelist with Stalinin lehmät (Stalin’s Cows) in 2003 which was followed by Baby Jane two years later. Another two years later the author brought out her first play and then developed it into her third novel, Purge (original Finnish title: Puhdistus), released in 2008 which earned her wide international fame and several important literary awards. Her latest published novel is When the Doves Disappeared (original Finnish title: Kun kyyhkyset katosivat) from 2012. Sofi Oksanen lives in Helsinki, Finland.

Purge is the story of a family living the vicissitudes of European history in the twentieth century. The plot is mainly set in a remote village of Western Estonia and takes place on two time levels, the early 1990s and the 1940s, both eras of drastic change in the Baltic region. The protagonists are Aliide Truu, an Estonian peasant woman in her late sixties, and Zara, a young forced sex worker originating from Vladivostok who after having escaped from her Russian Mafia pimps seeks help and refuge on Aliide Truu’s farm. The elderly woman is suspicious when she finds the seedy girl sleeping under a tree in her yard one morning, but she also has pity. As soon as Aliide wakes up Zara pouring a bucket of water over her, she notices terror and signs of endured torture in her which unleash a flood of memories from the years when the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, World War II and its aftermaths turned upside down Aliide’s and all her family’s life. In order to survive and to avoid more interrogations she married Martin, a fervent and very loyal member of the Communist party, and agreed to denounce her older sister Ingel as well as her seven-year-old niece Linda so they would be deported to Siberia. She also had a still more selfish reason for her betrayal: she wanted Hans Pekk, her brother-in-law, whom she and her sister were hiding from the Soviet officials on the farm all for herself. What Aliide doesn’t know when Zara turns up in her yard is that the girl is the granddaughter of Ingel who taught her Estonian and gave her an old photo with the farm’s address and Aliide’s name on it. But before this secret is revealed both women have to face each one for herself the purge in which they got caught. 

The style in which Sofi Oksanen tells the story of Purge from the point of view of an auctorial narrator is very matter-of-fact although her language is rather poetic (even in German translation) and full of symbols like flies and boots. An interesting peculiarity of the novel is that diary entries of Hans Pekk in hiding interrupt the narrative ever again. For the rest, the narrative jumps often and quickly between the two time levels and background stories of Aliide and Zara. The horrors of Soviet occupation in Estonia (as everywhere else in Stalin’s sphere) and the relentless chase after potential enemies of the Communist cause are depicted truthfully and in accordance with many other accounts of the time. The interrogations which Aliide, Ingel and even Linda had to undergo in the cellars of the local administration building make the violence and cruelty against them felt although torture and rape as part of the established procedure are only hinted at here. In her description of the ways how the two Russian Mafia pimps brought Zara to heel and which mirrors Aliide’s remoter experience of sexual terror the author is more outspoken without ever sounding vulgar as happens so often in similar cases. 

Overall Purge is an excellent read which shows once more that times of war and dictatorial regimes make legalised crime thrive. At any rate, I recommend Purge by Sofi Oksanen and hope that its readers will learn their lesson from it. 

An excerpt from Purge is available here on WORDS without BORDERS:

Book Review: The Wedding in Auschwitz by Erich Hackl

After two months it’s high time for some more Austrian literature on my blog. There are quite some contemporary writers in my country who can boast with notable success in German-language literature and a few of them have even seen their work translated into English. One of those Austrian writers is Erich Hackl. For this review I picked The Wedding in Auschwitz which was first released in English in spring 2009 and which to the translator Martin Chalmer’s great disappointment didn’t receive much public attention. 

Erich Hackl was born in Steyr, Austria, in May 1954. After his German and Hispanic studies he worked as a teacher and editor, later as a translator, journalist and writer in Vienna and Madrid. Already his first novels Aurora’s Motive (Auroras Anlaß) and Farewell Sidonia (Abschied von Sidonie) from 1987 and 1989 respectively established him as a master of forging well-researched true stories into literary form reminding of Latin-American testimonial literature. Only two of his later novels have been translated into English so far, namely Narratives of Loving Resistance (Entwurf einer Liebe auf den ersten Blick: 1999) and The Wedding in Auschwitz (Die Hochzeit von Auschwitz: 2002). His latest novel titled Familie Salzmann was released in 2010. Erich Hackl lives and works in Madrid and Vienna. 

For his novel The Wedding in Auschwitz Erich Hackl patches up the memories of a dozen of people who have in one way or another been linked to the lives of the protagonists Margarita “Marga” Ferrer Rey and Rudolf “Rudi” Friemel, the couple whose wedding in the registry office of Auschwitz on 18 March 1944 at 11 a.m. inspired the novel and its title. From his earliest days the Viennese Rudi has been an ardent socialist. So early in 1938 he joined the International Brigades in Spain to fight for the republic against the fascist troops of General Franco. During a visit of a group of Mujeres Antifascistas (anti-fascist women) from Barcelona at the front line close to Falset, Rudi and Marga met for the first time and for both it was love at first sight. Whenever Rudi was in Barcelona, he met Marga and when the International Brigades were withdrawn from the front line in autumn 1938 he asked the father for her hand, but was rebuffed. Despite all Marga and Rudi got married in Spain before Rudi and his brothers-in-arms had to flee across the borders to German-occupied France where they were seized in a camp. Also Marga and Marina escaped from the fascist troops to France. They were interned in a camp and later forced to work in the area of Annecy. Rudi traced and joined them. On 26 April 1941 Marga gave birth to a son and shortly afterwards Rudi decided to accept the offer of the Nazi officials to be repatriated. Since General Franco had declared all marriages contracted under republican law null and void, Rudi wanted to take his family home to Vienna and get properly married there, but things were to take a different course than he expected. 

The Wedding in Auschwitz isn’t a novel of the kind that Europeans like me are used to from childhood. Although it tells the true life story of the protagonists Marga and Rudi from birth to death, the book can’t even be called a biographical novel with full right. It’s much rather the testimony of some people who knew the couple and their lives at a given moment in time or have information about them. Erich Hackl worked up the material in the same way as a director might have done for a documentary. The narrators are alternating all the time because the author lets each one of the interviewed witnesses tell her/his part of the story with her/his own voice and from her/his own point of view. In the beginning this can be a bit confusing since the identity of the narrators is revealed only through what they say and it isn’t always clear at once who is currently talking. The language used is simple and matter-of-fact as suits the topic. 

Admittedly, I’m not a huge fan of Erich Hackl, but this may be because in general I prefer pure fiction to true stories which rather limit the author’s scope. The Wedding in Auschwitz is a really good book which deserves being more widely read and which I’d like to recommend to everybody who is interested in life under the Nazi regime and in the concentration camps.