Tony's Reading List

Moonlighting

2012-02-15T10:00:00.000+11:00

Today, I'm making a guest appearance over at Booklover Book Reviews: I'll be talking about Australian literature, looking at an author I admire, and having a good old-fashioned whinge about something that annoys me - why not take a quick look?

Normal service will be resumed here on the blog tomorrow - also Oz-Lit related :)

The Return of the Man with the Magnificent Whiskers

2012-02-13T06:00:00.000+11:00

While I quite enjoyed my month of women writers, it's nice to get back to a less-restrictive reading pattern - especially nice when that entails a return from an old friend. And when I say 'old friend', I'm not talking about Trollope himself (although he has kept me company for many a year now), but one of his many fictional creations, a certain Mr. Phineas Finn. We first met the charming Irish politician in Phineas Finn, the second of Trollope's Palliser Novels, and Phineas Redux, the fourth of the set, returns our friend to London from his Dublin sabbatical.

After a couple of years away from Westminster, Finn's misguided, but principled, betrayal of his party has long been forgotten, and a letter from an old colleague (along with a feeling of emptiness after his wife's death) soon persuades Phineas to cross the sea and don his parliamentary armour once more. In no time at all, the reader is back in the midst of Trollope's usual scenes: crooked elections, breath-taking hunts and bitter, spiteful debates in the House of Commons. It's almost as if we were never away...

The more the novel unfolds, however, the more obvious the differences with the first book (what Trollope actually thought of as the first half of a single book) become. In Phineas Finn, our friend is a young, innocent, indestructible character. While he has his troubles, we never have any doubt that he will fall, cat-like, on his feet, usually with a thousand pounds a year and a new love interest to keep him going.

Phineas Redux though introduces a rather more mature Finn, a darker, more pessimistic man. Where his first attempts to climb the political ladder were almost playful, now that he is keener than ever to make politics his profession, he sees that it is far from the noble pursuit he once thought it. While the landed gentry, unburdened by the need to actually live off their parliamentary earnings, may be able to command respect, men like Finn, without fortunes of their own, are required to scramble for every crumb which may fall from the party leader's table, sacrificing their dignity in the process

Another difference between the two books is that where Phineas was able to glide through this parliamentary life fairly comfortably during his first terms of office, his second attempt at politics runs a lot less smoothly. Mr. Bonteen, a minor character in Phineas Finn who is foregrounded in this novel, becomes a major obstacle in our hero's path, one whose spite causes Finn to be left out in the cold by his Liberal Party superiors. Finn and Bonteen quickly become sworn enemies - until, that is, Bonteen is mysteriously removed from the picture...

The 'redux' of the title is Latin for 'restored' or 'brought back', and it is apt for many reasons. Not only is our friend (and his moustache!) brought back for the reader's delight, so too are many characters we have met in the first three of the Palliser novels. This is one of the many joys of reading Trollope's work - though he, like many Victorian writers, uses a number of minor plot strands, he is able to make these sub-plots more interesting by using old friends to paint in the minor details of the bigger picture.

Who needs to invent scores of new characters when you can bring back the likes of the Duke of Omnium, Madame Max Goesler and Lord Chiltern? When the pivotal murder strand needs an alternative murderer, who better than to fulfil that role than a shady character we met in the previous novel? Even where there's a need for a new character, let's just pluck a relative of the wonderfully sanguine Plantagenet Palliser from the aether to suit our purposes. Comfort reading indeed :)

As is always the case with my reviews of the Palliser novels, there are several other ideas which would justify a post in their own right. Just as Phineas Finn did, Phineas Redux once more examines the frustrations of middle-class women in Victorian England, bored to tears and prey for idle gentlemen when single, mere chattels of their husbands when married (especially if the marriage was more for the sake of convenience than love). The character of Lady Laura Kennedy is an exceptional one, and a thorough retracing of her character over the course of the two books would show a complexity that many readers may think beyond Trollope.

There's also the small matter of the double-edged sword of publicity and the fashionable world. Phineas benefits greatly from his high-class connections and his position in parliament, but the flip side of this is the extra attention paid to him in his most difficult hours. The crusade against him in the pages of The People's Banner is eerily reminiscent of the way certain British tabloids consider it their duty to interfere with the lives of the rich and famous today...

Despite all these fascinating ideas though, the reader will always return to the man himself, our young Irish friend, a character whose early innocence and joy for life has been seriously tempered by the ordeals he has gone through. By the time we reach the end of this chapter of his story, we fully understand why he makes the decision he does. No longer is he as happy a man as he was when he first set foot in London; in return though, he has acquired a much greater maturity and depth of character, traits which will stand him in good stead in later years when he eventually returns to the parliamentary fray - which he will, as a minor character, in the final two novels in the series.

Don't worry - next time I'm in the Palliser world (in the not-too-distant future...), I'll be sure to give him your regards...

Making Sense(ibility) of it all

2012-02-09T18:00:00.000+11:00

An alien, walking into the average Anglophone bookshop, would be forgiven for thinking that Jane Austen must have been the single greatest writer in the history of literature. Despite only producing a handful of works, various editions of her novels tend to be scattered across the shelves, dominating the classics section wherever you go. The fact that our Alien friend probably wouldn't have made it that far, having been distracted by the gigantic vampire section at the front of the shop is a matter for another time - although, even here, you're never far away from Saint Jane...

While I quite like Austen's work, I'm not the biggest of fans myself, and the one novel I've had trouble with in the past is Sense and Sensibility, a book I read a couple of times in my youth. A spate of reviews recently brought it to mind, and (as I was in the middle of my Women Writers Month) I thought I would give it another try. Did I end up loving it, or was I able to find out what it is about the book that puts me off ? Patience, patience...

Sense and Sensibility, as many of you will know, is primarily focused on the lovelives of the two eldest Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. After the death of their father, they are forced into a move to pastures fresh by the stinginess of their half-brother (and the meanness of his wife...). The move takes the sober, rational Elinor away from the man her sister believes her to be engaged to, Edward Ferrars; however, for the impetuous, passionate Marianne, the change of scenery brings with it two very different suitors. Will the two sisters find love and happiness at the end of the novel?

Yep, stupid question. A better question, of course, is who the lucky men will be, and how it will all pan out; a relatively happy ending is never in doubt. Of course, there are many twists and turns before we find the answer, and we have ample opportunity to observe the two girls and marvel at their opposing attitudes to life. Elinor's clear-headed, over-cautious approach clashes at all points with Marianne's uncompromising quest for the perfect romance...

...and this is exactly what Austen is aiming to do, as the sisters are more than just characters. They are actually embodiments of two philosophical approaches, with Elinor representing the Enlightenment and Rationalism, while Marianne is the epitome of Romanticism. The reader is able to compare and choose between two modes of life, the scientific and the natural, the cool and the passionate, the reserved and the uninhibited. At first, it appears that the choice is an easy one, as much as we would all enjoy running barefoot up and down hills all summer; however, the longer the novel goes on, the more it becomes apparent that both extremes have their disadvantages.

Is it a good book? Of course, but that is pretty much a given, and not the question I'm trying to answer for myself here. Do I like it? Yes, but... There is a lot to like about Sense and Sensibility, not least the metaphorical rope Austen gives her characters, allowing them to commit social suicide at their leisure, but I have a few reservations which affected my enjoyment of the book.

The first is that unlike Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Sense and Sensibility delivers you into the hand (and mind) of a central character it is very difficult to feel for. I get the impression that Austen began the book thinking that Elinor was the natural heroine, the sister most people would sympathise with, but the longer the novel goes on, the less clear this impression becomes. It is also very hard at times to distinguish between what Elinor thinks and what the impersonal narrator is saying. Occasionally, some very nasty things are said, and people are most cruelly depicted, but it is difficult to tell whose opinion this is...

Another problem is the resolution of the story and the matrimonial choices made. The last part of the novel seemed rather rushed and contrived, and while Austen certainly justifies her decisions, I can't say I agree with them (I would have chosen different partners for both Elinor and Marianne!). Certainly, Marianne's recovery and eventual surrender are very weak to the modern eye.

Finally, Sense and Sensibility, unlike other Austen novels I've read, seemed horribly claustrophobic. I felt trapped inside Elinor's point-of-view (not one I particularly enjoyed) while everything of importance was happening elsewhere. Each time the sisters announced that they were to up sticks and visit another part of England, I rejoiced, grateful for the change of pace that would ensue.

I know that this restricted female life was the reality for the time, and certainly not restricted to this book; however, it's something that I noticed much more here than in the other Austen novels I've read in recent years. I am (as someone recently mentioned...) more in my comfort zone in the later Victorian era, and one reason for that is the extended palette the writers use. After wandering through the vast Dickensian and Trollopian expanses of London, being stuck sewing in a cramped cottage seems a little tame by comparison...

Don't let me put you off reading Sense and Sensibility: it's an excellent novel, and this post has been more about helping myself to understand my feelings towards it than about coming to any objective conclusion as to the worth of the book. Nevertheless, I fully expect outraged Janeites to disagree - comments and abuse in the usual place, please ;)

Sadly though, that's all I've got time for today. I've just had a call from the local bookshop - apparently, there's a little green man, clutching a copy of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and he does not look happy. Duty calls...

How I Lost Your Mother

2012-02-06T06:00:00.000+11:00

I am a fairly placid sort of blogger, one unwilling to lay into novels in the way some reviewers do, but there are some books which, for some reason or other, just annoy me. Let's leave it there for a while...

Kyung-Sook Shin's Please Look After Mother (translated by Chi-Young Kim) is a Korean million-selling novel, due to be published in twenty-three countries and short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. It's a story in five parts, told from the points of view of the titular mother's family members after her disappearance on a visit to Seoul to see her family. She becomes separated from her husband at the city's main train station and, despite the family's best efforts, cannot be found.

However, the novel is less about the search for the mother than a reevaluation of her life, seen through the eyes of the people who have taken her for granted for so long. As they begin to share stories, they realise that the picture they had of her is deeply flawed, and each of them realises just how much she meant to them - if only too late. It's also an allegory for the situation of the nation as a whole, one which may have sacrificed its past in order to ensure a prosperous future.

Before you start thinking that this is a wonderfully heart-warming story though, one you might want to look for on your local library database, let me give you a piece of advice - don't bother. Please Look After Mother is a piece of trashy kitsch, a giant guilt-trip of a book which has probably sold its million copies simply by virtue of making middle-class Koreans uncomfortable about not having called Mum much recently. I am amazed that it made it onto the Man Asian short-list (ahead of Murakami's 1Q84!), and I am crossing my fingers that the panel aren't short-sighted enough to actually give it the prize.

So what's wrong with it? To be honest, there isn't much right with it, but I'll list a few of my concerns. The way the book is structured, using first-, second- and third-person viewpoints, is gimmicky and pointless - the idea adds nothing to the story being told. The actual story itself is repetitive: once you get past the first section, it's the same old story of whining, sibling squabbles and hand-wringing. The characters are wooden and unlikeable, especially the men (which could be a cultural thing or merely bad writing), and shout at each other at the drop of a hat. I think you've got the idea by now that I'm not a huge fan.

What was probably a very average novel in the original though has undoubtedly been made worse by a sub-par translation. Please Look After Mother reads like a clichéd translated novel, clumsy, with unnatural sentence structure and over-formal language (meant to reflect the original Korean, no doubt, but out of place in a translation). There were also several errors with pronouns, forcing me to go back and find out who exactly was supposed to be talking to whom, and an obsession with repeated relative clauses, which just looked strange in English.

It's sad because the idea behind the novel is a good one. The premise of an old woman's disappearance serving as a reflection on the price paid for the rapid societal progress South Korea has made over the past few decades is a very interesting one. We get to see how Seoul has developed in the space of a generation, and the way in which the population has shifted from a rural to a mainly urban one in a matter of decades. However, Shin's treatment of these issues is superficial and fleeting, as is her attempt to portray the effect of the mother's disappearance on her family. Sadly, I really didn't care about any of them.

As I am nothing but fair though, I'll finish by pointing you in the direction of a few more reviews. The team behind the Shadow Man Asian Prize have nearly all reviewed this book, so why not have a look at what they had to say? I'm sure it'll be more entertaining than the book itself...

January 2012 Wrap-Up

2012-02-02T18:00:00.000+11:00

We're back for another year of reading and reviewing, and it's time for my first monthly wrap-up for 2012. On the spur of the moment, January became my Women Writers Month, with a couple of delights from each of my specialist areas (plus one bonus featurette!), all written by women - which means that they have a big head-start on the men this year! But enough waffle, let's get on to the numbers...

*****
Total Books Read: 11

Year-to-Date: 11

New: 10

Rereads: 1

From the Shelves: 5

From the Library: 2

On the Kindle: 4

Novels: 8

Novellas: 2

Non-Fiction: 1

Non-English Language: 6 (2 Japanese, 2 German, 1 Spanish, 1 Korean)

In Original Language: 2 (2 German)

Books read in January were:

1) The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto

2) The Seamstress by María Dueñas

3) Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T.) by Christa Wolf

4) Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

5) Impressions of Theophrastus Such by George Eliot

6) Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa

7) Silly Novels by Lady Novelists by George Eliot

8) Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany

9) Das Gemeindekind (The Community Child) by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

10) Please Look After Mother by Kyung-Sook Shin

11) Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Murakami Challenge: 0 (0/3)

Aussie Author Challenge: 2 (2/12)

Australian Women Writers Challenge: 2 (2/10)

Japanese Literature Challenge: 2 (10/1)

Tony's Turkey for January is: Kyung-Sook Shin's Please Look After Mother

My inaugural monthly turkey (the 'award' has been established so that I'll have a dozen plump birds to choose from at the end of the year!) is Please Look After Mother, a book which has somehow made the shortlist for the Man Asian Prize. I have no idea how, as it is a weak, sickly-sweet, poorly-written (and poorly-translated) slip of a book. The central idea is a really good one; I just find the execution totally lacking. Until I read this one, I had assumed that The Seamstress would be taking home the drumsticks - the reality is though that despite its flaws, I actually quite enjoyed Dueñas' book at times, something I can't say for Shin's...

Tony's Recommendation for January is: Alexis Wright's Carpentaria

The chillingly dark Hotel Iris was excellent, and my latest find from the electronic graveyard, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's study of nature versus nurture, Das Gemeindekind, was also a front-runner. However Wright's lengthy story of life in Australia's far north won out for its blend of social commentary and magical story-telling - definitely one that any reader can enjoy :)

That's all for January then. I'll see you all again in February, when I'll probably have a few books by men to review - and about time too ;)

It Takes A Community To Raise A Child

2012-01-31T06:00:00.000+11:00

It has been about a year now since a Kindle first arrived on my doorstep, and a glance at the contents of my little electronic friend will quickly tell you what I have become accustomed to using it for. The majority of the digital books I have stored away for a rainy day are German-language classics, books I'm not quite sure of but would like to give a go, and it is for this availability of free classic texts that I am extremely grateful. While blindly perusing Teutonic novellas doesn't always work out for the best (e.g. Die Glücksritter, Die Judenbuche), more often than not (e.g. Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Lena Christ) I've come up with some new favourite writers.

Today's book then is another of these G-Lit classics, a famous novel by a Victorian-era Austrian writer (who fits in nicely with my Women Writers Month!), Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. Das Gemeindekind (The Community Child or The Child of the Parish) is an excellent book, a psychological (psychoanalytical?) tale of a case study of nature versus nurture. I'm aware of the cliché of dragging Freud's name into any review of an Austrian book, but it is sadly unavoidable in this case...

Martin Holub, a lazy, drunken brickmaker, arrives in a small village with his family, and within the space of six months is driven out again - at which point he robs and murders the local clergyman. He is promptly sentenced to death, and his wife Barbara, who refuses to dispute Martin's attempt to lay the blame on her, is sentenced to ten years in prison. Unfortunately, this causes another issue for the small township - what to do with the couple's two children...

Persuading the local baroness to take charge of the sweet and likeable daughter Milada is a fairly simple matter. However, the teenage son, Pavel, a surly, stubborn youth, becomes the community's responsibility, one which it could do without. Sent to live with a family who are themselves not without their own criminal tendencies, it seems as if Pavel is destined for an unhappy life and an early (and unnatural death). But the local teacher, a man who knows what it's like to be ostracised decides that there is more to Pavel than the community is willing to admit...

Das Gemeindekind is a wonderful book, a Bildungsroman which avoids the trap of idealising the young man whose life it is describing. Pavel may be the hero of our story, but he is far from perfect. He is an angry young man, enraged with the way society in general (and certain people in the village in particular) have already decided that he is worthless and (as one character remarks) on his way to join either his mother or his father.

Whenever events fail to go his way, his short fuse burns through, further justifying the unjustified opinions of all who live around him. On seeing the seductive and mischievous Vinska, a girl he has a secret crush on, in the arms of another man:

"Über den Anblick vergaß Pavel seinen Hunger - seine Ungeduld wich einem rasenden, ihm unbegreiflichen Schmerz; wie in den Fängen eines Raubtieres wand er sich und brachte ein entsetzliches Röcheln hervor." p.35

"At this sight, Pavel forgot his hunger - his impatience was replaced by a throbbing, incomprehensible pain; he twisted and turned as if in the clutches of a predator and brought forth a terrible groan."***

His aggressive behaviour, coupled with his tendency to play up his bad reputation, makes it likely that he will follow his parents' lead...

However, Pavel is fortunate enough to find one person willing to believe in him, the local teacher Habrecht ('Beright' would be a an appropriate Dickensian translation of this name!). In one of his first appearances in the book, he is forced to give Pavel a thrashing in front of the class, but:

"Seine Ansicht war, daß solche vor einem jugendlichen Publikum vorgenommene Exekution demjenigen, an dem sie vollzogen wird, selten nützt, und denen, die ihr zusehen, immer schadet." p.19

"His view was that such punishments carried out before a young audience are seldom useful for those they punish, and always harmful for those who look on."***

Habrecht is initially the only one willing to take up Pavel's case (and that includes Pavel himself), but the more our young hero matures, the more he is accepted by the community, and the better his character becomes as a consequence.

As stated above, Ebner-Eschenbach uses Das Gemeindekind as a vehicle to explore the idea of nature versus nurture, forcing us to examine our prejudices. Not only does Pavel have to contend with the lax upbringing of his biological father; his new guardians are fairly loose with the law themselves. The more trouble Pavel gets into, however, the more likely people are to attribute it to his genes than the lack of care shown by the community.

There is also more than a hint of racial prejudice at play: the events take place back in the days of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, and it appears that the Czech-sounding name of Pavel Holub - and his family's gipsy-like wanderings - may have instantly drawn suspicion from some of the more Germanic leading citizens of the town. If we throw in the Oedipal context of Pavel's struggles to provide a home for his mother once she is released from prison, you can see that there is a lot going on beneath the surface of this book...

On the face of it, Das Gemeindekind doesn't have a lot in common with other Bildungsromane, such as Great Expectations. However, it does share one excellent trait with Dicken's novel. Like Pip, Pavel does not come to the end of his story on the final page of the novel; the end of the book is merely the start of another chapter in his life (one I would be very interested in reading, if it existed...). Unlike Great Expectations though, there's one really bad thing about this book - those of you who are unable to understand German are unlikely to ever be able to read it :(

*****

The translations of the German in this text, marked ***, are my own, less-than-perfect attempts :)

A Little Silliness Goes a Long Way

2012-01-29T06:00:00.000+11:00

Last week I posted on the last of George Eliot's works of fiction, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, but until that post became a little longer than expected, I had actually intended to review another side of Eliot's writing along side it - one which I've finally got around to talking about today :) As you may have heard, Eliot, as well as being a novelist, was a writer of essays and assorted non-fiction, and while I was stumbling around her Wikipedia page, I came across a link to a text copy of a certain literary text she wrote...

The title - Silly Novels by Lady Novelists - will immediately tell you what it's all about, and the essay does exactly what it says on the tin. In twenty pages or so, Eliot discusses various types of dreadful novels, and... but let me hand you over to the lady herself:

"Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them - the frothy, the prosy, the pious or the pedantic."

Where Impressions of Theophrastus Such was a little lacking in humour, this piece has it in spades, dripping in sarcasm while ripping bad writers to shreds. This particular lady novelist really has it in for those of her gender who give everyone else a bad reputation. While female writers in the Victorian era were often forced into the profession (as the only one suitable for a middle-class lady in need of an income), Eliot suspects that many of the worst offenders do not have this excuse. She writes:

"It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-coloured ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains."

Ouch.

One particular criticism is the formulaic nature of certain novels, with their unrealistic characters and simplistic plots, where:

"The vicious baronet is sure to be killed in a duel, and the tedious husband dies in his bed requesting his wife, as a particular favour to him, to marry the man she loves best, and having already dispatched a note to the lover informing him of the comfortable arrangement."

Eliot scathingly dissects numerous bad examples of the genres she criticises, wittily expounding upon the female protagonists more competent in ancient languages than the average college professor (and more prone to using that ability in public), and four-year-old children who can express their feelings with the pathos of a romantic poet. She is, as you've probably gathered by now, not very generous about it.

And why should she be? As she points out, the efforts of these dilettantes do women in general (and female writers in particular) a disservice. It's hard enough being a female writer in a man's world, without being compared to the mindless creators of the works savaged here. Eliot claims that this has happened because the awful amateur is received kindly - at first:

"By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman's talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if she ever reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point."

Perhaps Eliot was a little sensitive here to criticism of her own work...

I'm not usually one for including several direct quotations from books, but once again I was tempted to copy huge swathes of this essay and let Eliot speak for herself. She is quite simply a wonderful writer, and when freed from the constraints of a monstrous three-volume novel, she can also be very, very funny. Silly Novels by Lady Novelists is freely available and fairly short, so I would recommend that you give it a go. It is well worth the effort :)

Blinded by Science

2012-01-27T06:00:00.000+11:00

With my focus on female writers this month, and the plethora of Australian challenges I'm taking part in (see the icons on the right of my blog for details), when I heard of Carrie Tiffany's latest book, I thought it sounded like one for me. I was cheeky enough to ask for a review copy of Mateship with Birds and her previous novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, and the lovely people at PanMcMillan (Picador) Australia were kind enough to send me a copy of both. Sometimes life's like that :)

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living is set in the Mallee region in country Victoria, a part of the Australian wheat belt, in the 1930s, where our main character, Jean Finnegan, is travelling around on the Better Farming Train, a government-funded initiative to bring progress and development to the people outside the major capitals. Jean, a superb seamstress (two in one month!) falls in love with Robert Pettergree, an expert on soils, and the two of them very quickly decide to get married and establish their own farm in the Mallee, one based on scientific principles.

With Robert's farming expertise and Jean's wealth of household knowledge, the couple are sure they can make a go of things out in the country. Sadly though, events conspire against them: the harsh Australian climate takes its toll on all the farmers eking out a living, and the Great Depression rolls in from the city to the country. Sometimes scientific living just isn't enough...

There's a lot to like about this book. It stands out from the usual urban tales of Australiana, ignoring the state capital of Melbourne and instead concentrating on life out in the country, where when people talk about the city, they mean the small regional centre of Swan Hill, not the bustling metropolis which the best tennis players in the world are currently visiting ;) It's also a reminder that the Great Depression was a worldwide affair, not a Steinbeckian phenomenon limited to the heartlands of America, and we can see the effects of the drought and economic disaster right here on our doorstep.

One by one, farmers fall victim to the drought, unable to cope in times of reduced rainfall and economic hardship. As Robert, on the orders of the state government, tries to move the farmers on to a more scientific method of growing wheat, the signs of the Depression are already in the air. The very train bringing the super phosphate, the chemical which is to increase the wheat yield, also harbours economic refugees from the city - the first signs of what is to come.

It's also an interesting book in a feminist light as we get to see Jean's motives for marrying and the world she has born into, not one which encourages young women to hang around waiting for a man or to try to make a go of it on their own. In an early flash back, we see Jean at school, in a scene where we are told in no uncertain terms what her role in society is to be:

"I didn't like it when the teacher split us into boys and girls and we had special talks. Our talks were about being modest and having babies. The teacher showed us a map of Australia and drew a big rectangle inside the middle of it with a ruler.
'See this - all empty. And whose job is it to fill up the empty continent with lovely healthy babies? It's your job, girls. What an honour. What a privilege...'" p.16 (Picador, 2005)

When we move forward twenty years, we see that little has changed. On moving to her new home of Wycheproof, Jean visits the small library at the local Mechanics' Institute. Unfortunately though, she is unable to get her library card on that day - the application form has to be filled out in the name of her husband...

It is against this background that Jean's decision to get married, even if it is to someone she loves (and sexually desires) is made. With no real family life to return to, she finds it easy to throw in her lot with the taciturn Robert, deciding to stick it out in the country, whatever may happen. However, for Robert, life is not so simple. His belief in the progressive nature of science and the inevitability of correct preparation bringing superior results, means that he is unable to cope with the cruel surprises nature - and economics - spring on him. Perversely, the more Jean rises to the challenge, the more he loses his faith in what he is doing, and his nature prevents him from truly confiding in the woman he has chosen to share this life of hardship.

It's not a perfect book by any means. It's a little short, and the part about the train, a mobile practical classroom roaming around country Victoria, is over in a flash, half making you wonder whether it was worth including it at all. There are several sex scenes which, while probably serving some purpose, seemed a little exaggerated and superfluous at times, and one supporting character, the Japanese scientist Mr. Ohno, bordered on a caricature, one which I really didn't think worked very well at all. The writing is also fairly sparing and simple - while effective, there are no elegant, lexical pyrotechnics to be found here (although many readers may consider this a good thing!).

Overall though, these are minor, personal quibbles, and the positives of Tiffany's novel far outweigh the negatives. It's an easy read, but a compelling one, and anyone interested in Australian history will particularly enjoy Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living. Having enjoyed the first novel then, I'll be very happy to check out Mateship with Birds, again set in country Victoria, but this time in the 1950s. I see my Women Writers Month might last a little longer than I'd originally planned for...

It's All Under Control...

2012-01-24T12:00:00.000+11:00

Yoko Ogawa's Hotel Iris was written in 1996, but it took until 2010 for an English translation (courtesy of Stephen Snyder) to appear. While this is just another indictment of the lack of adventure in Anglophone publishing (I recall that Caroline told me she read it - in German - about ten years ago...), it's still a surprise. This is an excellent novel, one which should have been translated a lot earlier.

Anyone expecting another gentle, heart-warming tale in the vein of The Housekeeper and The Professor is, however, in for a bit of a shock. Hotel Iris is an erotically-charged, breath-taking and, at times, extremely disturbing book, definitely not one for the nervous among you. If this doesn't put you off though, then you'll certainly be rewarded for your bravery ;)

The novel begins in the hotel of the title, a run-down, ramshackle place, set a little back from the main beach of a Japanese seaside town. Mari, the teenage daughter of the hotel owner, leads a boring existence behind the front desk, checking in the guests and helping out with the cleaning and cooking when required. One night, there is a disturbance in one of the rooms when a prostitute runs out, screaming at the man inside. As she flees, the man booms out a command - words which turn Mari's world upside down.

It's not giving away much to say that Mari eventually becomes involved with the man, who turns out to be a translator, one claiming to be working on an obscure Russian novel. This is no ordinary summer fling though; not only is the translator about forty years older than Mari, he also has some rather specific sexual preferences - and a very murky past...

Hotel Iris is a fairly short novel, only 164-pages long in my version, yet it is incredibly deeply written. All of the handful of major characters have been skilfully brought to life, each of them adding their nuances to the overall picture: Mari's over-controlling mother with her obsession with her daughter's hair; the kleptomaniac maid, who may suspect Mari's secret; Mari's father, long dead, but a potential source of some of her issues. Even the hotel itself seems to be a part of the plot, with the 'R' of 'Iris' in the hotel's name-sign hanging ominously askew.

Mari herself is a wonderfully-complicated person, switching from a sweet, obedient mother's girl to a secretive, self-destructive wreck at the drop of a hat. Her deep need to be controlled and debased, stemming perhaps from events in her childhood, soon gets out of control. She's the perfect find for the sinister translator, an empty vessel to be filled as he wishes...

...and yet, we have to wonder at times who is using whom. The story is told from Mari's point of view, and there is no attempt to make excuses for herself or to shift the blame for matters fully onto the shoulders of the older man. While no secret is made of the translator's deep-seated rage and his need to control every element of his life, things never appear forced in his treatment of Mari - at least, not more than she wants.

Ogawa's novel can be extremely unsettling, but that's definitely not a bad thing. This is a book where even inanimate objects can appear dark and slightly unnerving. The fountain in the hotel courtyard, poisoned by waste from Mari's grandfather's illness, decays just as Mari's innocence does, and the story the translator is working on, a romance with a heroine called Marie, has parallels with Mari's own life. Pay attention while reading this book as there is definitely more to what happens in the small seaside town than meets the eye.

As I suggested above, this is not one of those pure, aesthetically-pleasing, Japanese novels westerners love to read, so it may not be to everyone's liking. However, if you're ready to try something a little darker, why not check in at the Hotel Iris? Its length means it'll only be an overnight stay; which is just as well - I wouldn't want to be in Ogawa's world for too long...

*****
And that brings down the curtain on the current Japanese Literature Challenge, the fifth in the series. Thanks again to Belezza for organising the event - as always, it has motivated me to get out there and discover lots of wonderful new writers (and spend time with some old friends). Hopefully, it won't be too long until JLC6 comes around :) Until then, ja mata - ki o tsukete ne ;)

Impressive Impressions

2012-01-22T10:00:00.000+11:00

When it came to choosing a Victorian writer to contribute to my Women Writers Month, it was hard to go past George Eliot, even though I've already read (and, in many cases, reread) all of her more famous fiction. I was originally planning to read The Mill on the Floss, when I remembered that I had a couple of her less well-known works on my Kindle - which brings me to today's offering...

Impressions of Theophrastus Such is one of Eliot's minor works of fiction, and probably one for the completist rather than the casual reader, but it's still an interesting little book. It consists of a series of philosophical musings on a range of topics, by a friendly narrator called (I assume) Theophrastus Such. Such is (in his own words) an averagely-intelligent middle-aged man who wants to tease out a few issues with regards to human behaviour. Of course, this is just a front, allowing the formidable mind of George Eliot to dissect the foibles of the Victorian middle classes :)

In eighteen short chapters, Such discusses issues such as people who cannot bear other people's success, the perils of attempting to create new research whilst stepping on other men's toes, the horrors of plagiarism, and the possible consequences of technological advancement. For the most part, the essays are written in a light-hearted manner, reminiscent of Jerome K. Jerome's Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, or Anthony Trollope's occasional quasi-philosophical asides to his readers, but as you can probably tell from the topics above, Eliot's serious side is never far from the surface, negating the humour a little.

Which is not to say that it's not humorous. I spent half my time highlighting wonderful passages, some thought-provoking, others witty, the occasional line being laugh-out-loud funny. One unfortunate man is treated as follows:

" Some listeners incautious in their epithets would have called Hinze an "ass". For my part I would never insult that intelligent and unpretending animal who no doubt brays with perfect simplicity and substantial meaning to those acquainted with his idiom." p.47

When discussing another gentleman, the person whose jealousy won't allow him to appreciate anything done by anyone else, Such ponders:

"Why, then did he speak of the modern Maro or the modern Flaccus with a peculiarity in his tone of assent to other people's praise which might almost have led you to suppose that the eminent poet had borrowed money of him, and shown an indisposition to repay?" p.38

And there's one particularly wonderful quote, one which may hit close to home for the bloggers among us...

"And however unpractical it may be held to consider whether we have anything to print which it is good for the world to read, or which has not been better said before, it will perhaps be allowed to be worth considering what effect the printing may have on ourselves." p.102

Perhaps I'd better move on...

While Impressions of Theophrastus Such is a wonderfully-entertaining read though, it's not perfect. You see, Eliot is such an intellectual giant that she occasional shoots too high, and the reader is likely to get lost if they are unacquainted with at least the rudiments of the classics and a firm grounding in modern foreign languages. While I appreciated the humour of the articles published in the "Selten-erscheinende Monat-Schrift" ("Rarely-Appearing Monthly", p.30), I doubt that many others would. Also, beginning one essay with half a page of untranslated French is unlikely to endear Mr. Such to many monolingual readers :(

Do stick with it though, because there are a couple of gems near the end. In one, Such (in a discussion with a friend) predicts the rise of the machines and the disappearance of the human race in a disturbingly Terminator-esque portrayal. In another, the most serious of the collection, Such (Eliot...) argues passionately for an end to prejudice against Jews, reliving the history of the race and showing how ludicrous society's treatment of them really is. She truly was a woman ahead of her time...

So where can you get this work? There don't seem to be any editions from the usual suspects, but The Book Depository has scanned and formatted it, offering a copy in its Dodo Press range for about AU$12. However, this edition is also available as a free PDF, so you can just pop over to the site and download it onto the electronic device of your choosing in a matter of moments - how good is that?!

Before you rush off though, I'll leave you with one last nugget of wisdom from the writings of the irrepressible Such. A while back I put forward Eliot as my champion to take on the rather unlikeable V.S. Naipaul after his nasty comments about female writers, and one sentence, taken from an essay about people who can't help giving their opinions, just sums up nicely why Eliot would be up to the task:

"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact..." p.37

There's nothing really to be added to that :)

Stories from the Land, Stories from the Sea...

2012-01-20T08:00:00.000+11:00

It's taken a full nineteen days of the new year, but I've finally got around to reviewing my first book for the multitude of Australian challenges I'm participating in this year - and it's a very good one to get me underway too :) Alexis Wright's Carpentaria was the winner of the 2007 Miles Franklin Award (Australia's most well-known book prize), amongst a stack of other literary contests, thus promising to be an excellent read. It certainly lives up to this promise...

*****

Carpentaria takes us to the Far-North-Queensland town of Desperance, an isolated little place on the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, a reasonable plane journey from any major city. A small white population lives in the town, existing mainly as vassals of the major mining company which has recently set up operations. Meanwhile, skirting the town on opposite sides, two Aboriginal tribes live in what some see as squalor, but which others regard as a traditional way of life.

The two groups are led by larger-than-life elders. The Eastsiders' chief is the ancient trickster Joseph Midnight, but it is the head of the Westsiders who is the key to Carpentaria. Normal Phantom is a fisherman, an ancient mariner with an unparallelled knowledge of the seas, and the stars which enable him to navigate them. After his wife leaves him, he temporarily decides to stay at home, spending his time making miraculous specimens of stuffed fish for envious Whites. It is not until one of his sons, the prodigal Will, returns to town bearing a less-than-welcome gift, that Norm decides that it is time to return to the ocean wave...

After the first two hundred pages or so of this book, I was starting to wonder if it was really a novel at all. The pace unfolds slowly, unhurriedly, each chapter languidly introducing and following a new character - the laconic Norm and his haughty wife, Angel Day; the miracle from the sea, Elias Smith; the nomadic Mozzie Fishman and the mysterious Will Phantom. The first half of the book seems to be more like a series of loosely-related novellas, set in the same town with a cast of extras in the background. Slowly though, Wright allows us to learn more information about our new friends, and Will's return to the aptly named Desperance (an apparent mix of hope and desperation...) kick-starts the narrative into another, more powerful gear.

On the surface, Carpentaria appears to be about the clash of the old and the new, the traditional and settling communities, but this is not really the case. Although the white community is there in body, in another sense, they're not really that important. Despite their position in the centre of the town, they are in fact marginal, irrelevant - until, that is, the time comes for scapegoats to be found, and the paths of the communities cross. In fact, for much of the book, more is made of the rivalry between the Westsiders and Eastsiders, both of whom believe they are the rightful owners of the land.

A more prominent issue is faith, and the way it supports those who truly believe. Of course, in a book like Carpentaria, this idea of faith is far from being restricted to the Christian religions; it has just as much to do with indigenous beliefs in the dreamtime and the debt owed to the memories of one's ancestors. The characters who prosper in the book are those who have kept their connection with their past, who refuse to forget where they came from.

This is one of the problems for the white inhabitants of 'Uptown' - rootless and (practically, if not theoretically) godless, they have nothing to cling to, nothing that pulls them together except a dependence on the mining money and a shared fear of both the Aboriginal population and the sea. This is a telling contrast to what drives people like Norm and Mozzie, whose constant retelling of inherited stories grounds them and connects them with with their past.

While Norm and Mozzie share a link with their history and traditions, they are separated in a much more fundamental way though, a gulf which is probably the biggest dividing force in Carpentaria. Norm is a man of the sea, and Mozzie is deeply rooted to the land; both are unable to function properly outside their natural environment. Norm is, metaphorically, if not literally, a fish out of water when stuck at home restoring his fish in his shed. His soul belongs out on the sea, sailing alone under the stars, with only the fish for company. Mozzie spends his life in a never-ending tour of the continent, visiting sacred places, paying respects to his ancestors and bending everyone's ear with his stories.

Desperance itself, caught in an uneasy position of being delicately poised between the unforgiving arid land and the menacing, ever-shifting shoreline, is unable to establish itself, unable to decide what it is. The white folk refuse to set out to sea, afraid of what might happen to them, preferring, despite their proximity to the wealth of the oceans, to look to the land for riches - a decision which will prove to be a misguided one by the end of the novel.

So what is Carpentaria? It will probably be a lot of things to a lot of people. It's a story of tension between black and white and between different tribes. It's an exploration of the importance of faith and history, an emphasis on the necessity of belonging. It's a description of how life can be, far from the centres of 'civilisation'. It's a novel with a wonderfully-imaginative style of writing, an Australian variety of magical realism, asking the reader to suspend disbelief while making them wonder if perhaps, just perhaps, it could all be true...

While reading Carpentaria, I had a small scrap of paper at the back of my book, ready for any pearls of wisdom which might occur to me. By the time I had finished reading, it was full of messy, scrawled fragments, too many to use in what has already become a lengthy, incoherent ramble. Even without being subjected to my musings on the role of angels, ghosts and demons, the suggestion of parallels with the American deep south and a lengthy polemic on racism, it will be pretty clear to the reader of this post that Carpentaria is a book I enjoyed greatly.

But how to leave the book behind... Well, I think a look at the name of one of our new friends will help us out here. In one way, the name of the book's main character sums the novel up pretty well as phantoms abound in the seas around Desperance. In another though, it's not terribly apt; you see, as I hope has become apparent by now, there's definitely nothing normal about Carpentaria...

A Short Life in Detail

2012-01-17T16:00:00.000+11:00

The famous (East) German writer Christa Wolf passed away in December last year, and sadly that was the event which pushed me into trying one of her books for the first time. I was supposed to have read Kein Ort, Nirgends (Nowhere on Earth) at university at one point, but as I recall I didn't even get around to buying it (which says less about Wolf than about my efforts at university...). This time, however, I managed to both buy and read one of her works - and, more importantly, enjoyed it as well.

Nachdenken über Christa T. (usually translated as The Quest for Christa T.) is an intriguing, at times confusing, story of the short life of a young woman living in the former German Democratic Republic. Our narrator meets Christa T. at school during the Second World War, and bumps into her again when studying at university a number of years later. The narrator uses the book to relate selected details from Christa's life, from the moment of that first meeting until her untimely death from leukaemia at the age of thirty-six.

So far, so normal, you may think; however, this book is anything but. It consists of a series of anecdotes from the narrator, who has been given a box of documents by Christa's widower and is determined to lay bare her friend's life in an attempt to explain to the reader what kind of woman she was and how she lived her life. But why should we care?

This is a question which is (deliberately) never satisfactorily answered, and it's not the only ambiguous part of the story. As the narrator relates events from Christa's life, the point of view slips back and forth between the first- and third-person, at times making it difficult to tell who is meant by 'ich' ('I'). In any case, the reader suspects that this issue of identification is complicated further by the temptation to throw a third speaker into the mix - Wolf herself. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator sympathises with Christa's tendency to slip into the third-person, citing "...die Schwierigkeit ich zu sagen." ("...the difficulty of saying I.", p.201)***. So just who is speaking here?

Knowing that the book is set in East Germany, it's difficult to avoid reading certain things into Nachdenken über Christa T., even though Wolf was one of the writers who stayed and defended her mother country. Christa is shown to be a free spirit who refuses to be tied down by the expectations of society, waltzing in and out of lectures, not caring if her marks drag down the average of her study group, running off with any man who takes her fancy. At one point, the narrator says:

"Kein Verfahren findet statt, kein Urteil wird gesprochen..." p.68

"No trial is taking place, no judgement is being made..."***

However, it is difficult to take this at face value; there is a pervading sense that the free-spirited Christa is somehow letting the system down by doing exactly (and only) what she wants to do. Mind you, the state censors let it slip through, so I won't labour the point ;)

This book, with its emphasis on examining a person's life in detail, enabling a portrait to be painstakingly built up, reminds me in many ways of another classic German novel, Heinrich Böll's Gruppenbild mit Dame (Group Portrait with Lady). Böll also used third-party sources to slowly develop his main character, avoiding having her appear in person until late in the piece to heighten the effect of the puzzle.

However, a major difference is that where Böll's Verf., the man engaged in building up a picture of Leni Pfeiffer, roamed far and wide interviewing people to get his information, Wolf's narrator refuses to ask others for help, preferring to rely on her own memory and the scraps of paper she has been given. At times, she even imagines conversations and scenes which may have taken place, filling in certain gaps for herself. When events start to become blurred later in the piece, this gives us even more reason to be suspicious of the facts - and of her motives...

Of course, we are given clues of this 'blurriness' early in the novel, when the narrator discusses the difficulties of ever getting a clear view of events, using clever word play related to poetry.

"Dichten, dicht machen, die sprache hilft. Was denn dicht machen und wogegen?" p.24

"To write poetry, to seal off, language helps us. Seal off what and from what?"***

Here Wolf is playing on the sounds of 'dichten' (to write poetry) and 'dicht machen' (to seal off) to explain that the role of poetry and literary writing is to obscure, just as much as it is to reveal.

This idea of 'defamiliarisation' would be a familiar(!) one to anyone who has studied literary theory, and while it may sound perverse, there is actually a kind of twisted logic in it. By defamiliarising an object and rendering it difficult to make out, the writer forces us to concentrate our attention much harder on it. In this way, we find something new in mundane objects which we don't really see properly any more.

And this is what Wolf does in Nachdenken über Christa T. - she takes an ordinary life and, through her smoke and mirrors, produces the story of a life less ordinary, a life spent trying to avoid being pigeon-holed, trying to find out what she actually wants from her time on earth. The narrator has used this opportunity in an attempt to show us, just one time, how Christa T. really was, not how people saw her. Why?

"Wann, wenn nicht jetzt?" p.219

"When, if not now?"***

*****

Page numbers are from the German Suhrkamp Taschenbuch edition (2007).
All quotes marked *** are my attempts at translation :)

1Q84 Review - Q & A with Yours Truly (Part Three of Three)

2012-01-15T10:00:00.001+11:00

I'm back for one final post on Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (a post which contains plot details some of you may not want to know!), and it seems that my inner voice has a couple more questions for me...

*****
That's right. Here's one for you to ponder - is 1Q84 finished?
Now that's probably one you weren't expecting ;) The easy answer to this is simply to say that of course it's finished. Murakami has written a three-volume novel (very like the Victorians he admires), and that's the end of the matter. While it would have been a little strange if the story had ended abruptly at the end of Book Two, with Tengo and Aomame finally together, away from the parallel world of 1Q84, we have what passes for a happy ending.

Even if you disagree that the end of Book Three represents an adequate ending, Murakami's previous works will provide evidence to the contrary. Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, two of his most famous (and substantial) works are every bit as surreal and confusing as 1Q84, and their endings are just as ambiguous and open to interpretation. Murakami is not known for wrapping things up in a neat bow (even Norwegian Wood, his most 'normal' book, ends in an unsatisfying manner), so why should we expect things to be tied up neatly here?

You would also think that Murakami himself is thoroughly over the book by now. He's a man of many interests, a writer who bounces between long novels, short stories, works of non-fiction, essays and translations, not exactly a good sign for anyone expecting him to devote more of his remaining years to one particular book. And anyway, if Book Four was in the pipeline, wouldn't we have heard about it by now?

So why am I even asking (myself!) the question? Simply because, to me at least, 1Q84, seems unfinished. There are just too many loose threads, even by Murakami's messy standards, stories which need to be explored further. Characters like Fuka-Eri, Tamaru and the Dowager have been left up in the air, waiting for their cue to return to the stage. The lack of cohesion which I mentioned in an earlier post could also be easily explained by the fact that there is more to come, further volumes which will pull these strands together.

One of the reasons I gave above against a sequel was that Aomame and Tengo had finally found each other, closing the gap which was providing the tension for the novel. But if you recall, there are a couple of details which indicate that this may not be the case. Aomame is carrying a baby, a child which could be of vital importance to the Sakigake group, and they are unlikely to just give up on her (especially as they are still chasing her for Leader's murder...).

There is also the small hint given at the end of the novel that the lovers have not actually succeeded in returning to the real world, but have entered a third world (1X84?!), which surely gives material for a continuation. Also, if there's another volume, we may even find out what exactly the little people are actually all about - surely there must be more to them than meets the eye...

You're probably unconvinced (and rightly so) - it's unlikely to ever happen. However, there is one more small piece of evidence from the text, one last crumb of comfort I'm taking from 1Q84. When Aomame is lying low in her new apartment, Tamaru brings her some reading material to the pass the time. It was, of course, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time - all seven volumes of it. Now if that's not a sign, I don't know what is...

You're not getting away that easily. You've talked a lot of rubbish about the book, but you still haven't committed yourself - did you like 1Q84?

I really am tough on myself :(

Did I like 1Q84? Of course I did :) Although there are a few exceptions out there, I think that most people who like Murakami's work will get a lot out of 1Q84. It may not have lived up to the hype (which, for regular readers at least, seemed to be up there with the return of Star Wars), but it's a welcome addition to the Murakami canon. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and will be adding it to my collection at some point for a later reread (the three-volume Australian edition pictured has, alas, now returned to the library - it was brand-new too...). And, let's face it, if I hadn't liked it, I would hardly have spent countless hours writing a series of reviews which has finally stretched to six separate posts :)

One final point I'd like to make, one I touched on in another post, is that while 1Q84 is one book, for me it is best seen as a series of separate works - and should be read as such. I raced through each of the books in a couple of days, but I actually gave myself a couple of days between each of the parts, going away and reading something else. In this way, I think I avoided some of the frustration many readers have expressed about Book Two (probably the weakest of the three). In fact, my wishes for paperback versions of 1Q84 would be three separate books, all with the Vintage UK black, white and red covers, novels which will slot neatly into my Murakami shelf...

...to be followed by any possible sequels. We can but dream :)

1Q84 Review - Q & A with Yours Truly (Part Two of Three)

2012-01-13T09:00:00.001+11:00

We're continuing our lengthy look at Haruki Murakami's latest work, so here's another gentle reminder that people who haven't completed the book yet may wish to come back another day - I don't want anyone to be disappointed by stumbling across secrets they have yet to uncover for themselves :)

*****
So, we've looked at what it's all about, but there's still something we haven't discussed - is 1Q84 any good?
That's a very good question (thank you Tony!), and it is one which is not that easy to answer. It is not at all difficult to pick holes in this novel as Murakami's imagination can often leave the reader scratching their head, wondering what exactly he is up to this time. Be that as it may though, there are several areas in particular that really make you cringe.

One of those is, of course, the suggestions of underage sex inside the cult. Although the exact details of this later become blurred (we're not really sure who these girls are, or if they're even human, and Leader claims not to be able to do anything about it), the fact is that Murakami writes about ten-year-old girls having sex and then dumps the idea somewhere in a corner. I actually thought, after finishing Book One, that the idea of sexual abuse would be the dominant idea of the novel, but Murakami seems to be merely using it as a plot device to move things along. I don't like that at all...

Another issue I have is the large amount of information Murakami dumps into the story. Part of the pleasure of reading his books is the way the narrative sweeps you along; you may not know what is going on around you, but you feel that the narrator, often a first-person point-of-view, is in the same boat. In fact, the metaphor of a boat, floating downstream towards the rapids, is an apt one for the usual style of Murakami's fiction. However, the constant stopping and starting in 1Q84, waiting around for back stories to be filled in (or for information to be repeated for the nth time) is frustrating. Book Two suffers particularly from this, and it's not exactly something that enhances the reading experience.

I can't finish my summary of the negatives without mentioning what could well be the silliest part of the book. No, not that sex scene; while not exactly great writing, it was inevitable, and I could see where it was going. I'm talking about the little people, or as I like to think of them, the seven Japanese dwarfs. If anyone can actually think of a reason for them to be in the book, a real need divorced from the supposed voices Leader hears, or the need for someone to construct the air chrysalis, please let me know. I really don't see what Murakami thought he was doing here - didn't he realise how stupid that whole idea seemed?

Before you all start tearing up your copies of 1Q84 though, let's look at the other side of the story. It's not as easy to pick out reasons why the book is actually a good one (the negatives are a lot more immediate and tangible), but they do exist. No, really, they do :)

One is that, for the Murakami fan, 1Q84 is the culmination of his life's work, with themes and ideas explored in earlier novels drawn together into one over-arching work. In the first of my more tongue-in-cheek looks at the book, I was allegedly torn between this idea and criticising Murakami for repeating himself. The truth is that I admire the way he has constructed the book, using the parallel narrative structure of Hard-Boiled Wonderland..., the usual everyman protagonist (e.g. The Trilogy of the Rat) and the societal concerns he has for Japan (e.g. A Wild Sheep Chase, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Underground). He has gone out on a limb with his attempt to tie it all together, and while it isn't a complete success, he should be applauded for it.

Despite using the familiar though, 1Q84 is also full of new ideas. The use of the third-person protagonists sets the book apart from Murakami's earlier work, and the introduction of a major female character, Aomame, is also a welcome addition. Even within the book, the introduction of a third voice in the final book is a big surprise, and one which sheds new light on the story. Ushikawa (who, incidentally, may have originally appeared in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle..) is key to understanding the story, the price he pays for his loneliness a contrast to what happens to Aomame and Tengo.

The best thing I can say about 1Q84 though (and I know that not everyone will agree with this) is that it is an absorbing read. The version you can see in the photo above was approximately 930 pages, but I never really felt that it was outstaying its welcome. The story, while ludicrous at times, pulled me along in its wake, always making me stay for just one more chapter. The concept of the meta-fictional Air Chrysalis is a brilliant one, and the idea of the beautiful - if slightly robotic - face of a book is one which probably happens more than we would like to admit (yesterday, on Twitter, a few of us were discussing who Murakami's inspiration for Fuka-Eri actually was!). By twisting the two (then three) strands around, the reader is offered a fuller flavour of what is happening, allowing us to get our heads around the writer's intentions. I'm not saying it always works...

So, after all that waffling, the answer is... sorry, what was the question? Oh yes, is it any good... I would argue that while it is by no means Murakami's best work, 1Q84 is a very interesting novel, and one which will reward those who reread it (especially those who have already ploughed their way through Murakami's earlier books). The question, of course, is how many people will be prepared to reread a book of this length :) There's also one final factor which needs to be considered when answering this question, one I haven't yet touched upon, and that is...

...what I'll be looking at in my last 1Q84 post - promise ;)

1Q84 Review - Q & A with Yours Truly (Part One of Three)

2012-01-10T12:00:00.002+11:00

Last year saw a few whimsical musings about Haruki Murakami's latest novel, 1Q84, but I can no longer hide behind split personalities, fictional characters and famous ghost-writers - it's time to get down to the serious business of unravelling my feelings on the book. In the next few posts, I'll be posing myself some rather stern questions and then watching myself squirm while attempting to answer them (fun for all involved!).

Before we begin though, just a friendly warning: if you haven't read the book yet, this might be your cue to slip away quietly before you find out something you didn't want to know yet. Don't worry - I won't hold it against you ;)

*****
So what's it all about, Tony?
Glad you asked - well, actually, no, I'm not. This is not an easy book to define, and any attempt to pigeon-hole it, or define it in one sweeping statement about themes is doomed to failure. One reason for this is the fact that 1Q84 consists of three books, and after finishing the set, I believe that this is actually how the series should be read.

Book One, as well as setting up the fictional world of 1Q84 (and introducing us to many of its delightful inhabitants), has a strong focus on sexuality, especially society's attitudes towards women. At the start of the book, the reader is led through a series of erotic escapades, both contemporary and relived in memory, and after a while there is an uncomfortable sense of voyeurism. At one point, I began to think that Murakami was simply indulging in cheap thrills...

However, when the writer begins to carefully disclose certain details from his protagonists' past lives, this feeling rapidly disappears. Instead, we are left to ponder the effects of physical and sexual abuse, whether on children or married women, and the way in which a society like the Japan of 1984 (an important point to remember...) can push this kind of abuse under the carpet. In the actions of Aomame, Ayumi, the Dowager and Tamaki Otsuka, we see the consequences of ignoring such brutal behaviour towards women: suicide, dangerous hedonism or revenge...

Book Two seems to shift focus somewhat, switching its attention to the subject of religious fanaticism and the effect it has on its adherents (and their children). During Aomame's lengthy chat with Leader (in the course of the strangest - and most unhurried - assassination ever), the truth of what has been happening between the head of the cult and his handmaidens comes to light; however, it appears that Aomame (and Murakami himself) is no longer so interested in what has, up to this point, been her primary motivation. The focus has switched to the organisation of Sakigake and a desire to know what exactly drives the religious group.

Of course, Sakigake are not the only fanatics highlighted in 1Q84. In the quest to avenge her daughter's death, the Dowager, the head of an equally shadowy empire (with, arguably, more efficient agents of revenge than Sakigake itself), has become a law unto herself, focused on righting perceived wrongs that the legal system is unable to deal with. And, of course, if we are discussing fanatics and monolithic systems, there's nobody as dedicated as Tengo's father - if the witnesses have made Aomame what she is, then Tengo is a product of neglect by NHK...

Book Three then moves the reader on to another tangent, this time concerned with loneliness. All three of the narrative characters, Ushikawa, Aomame and Tengo, spend time cooped up in confined spaces, with limited contact with the outside world. The result of the choices they have made, their solitude is a trial of strength and character, and Murakami does a great job of showing what a miserable life it can be when you're deserted by (or isolated from) those who make your life worth living.

It is here that Ushikawa is a useful foil to the two main characters. He is ultimately brought low by his inability to connect with other people and his insistence on going it alone. While Aomame and Tengo are also natural loners, the love they have for each other is a redeeming factor which saves them from the fate poor Ushikawa suffers. It is also interesting to note that it is Tamaru who brings Ushikawa's life to an end - his reaction on doing so shows that he realises that this is something which could (and quite possibly will) happen to him one day...

Three books - three ideas. Whether or not this is what Murakami intended is unanswerable (although highly unlikely!), but there does seem to be a progression in his ideas and interests as the work progresses. Perhaps it is is this lack of a single focus which makes 1Q84 a difficult book to pin down: a case of too many ideas spoiling the broth? Or a healthy blend of spicy ideas? Well, that remains to be seen ;)

*****
So, I've looked at what I think it may all be about, but to what extent has Murakami actually achieved his aims with 1Q84? Well, for the answer to that question, you'll have to come back next time...

Coming Apart at the Seams

2012-01-08T18:00:00.000+11:00

I came home from work a couple of months ago to find a book waiting for me, a fairly common occurrence around my neck of the woods. However, this particular incident was a little out of the ordinary as it was a book I'd never heard of and had not asked for (even my wife looked a little confused). Could it be... Yes, on this day, I had received one of those mythical items, an unrequested advance review copy, a sign that I too had ascended to the next circle of bloggerdom, become one of the chosen...

The book in question was María Dueñas' The Seamstress (also known as The Time In Between), a best-selling Spanish novel of a woman caught up in political intrigue during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. I was a little hesitant to read it at first, despite its being a translated work, as I suspected that it might be chick-lit in disguise (the cover certainly didn't convince me that it would be one I'd enjoy...). However, in the idea of trying new things, and with a month of reading books by female writers in full swing, I decided to give it a go :)

The Seamstress, translated by Daniel Hahn (although you have to look pretty hard to find his name...), is written around Sira Quiroga, a young dressmaker living in Madrid, who abandons her ordinary life (and her very ordinary fiancé) to run off with a smooth-talking salesman. Having been abandoned by her lover in Tangiers, she moves on to Tetouan (in the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco), where she is forced to work hard to pay off debts incurred by her horrible ex.

There she makes the acquaintance of Rosalinda Fox, an English woman who wants help making a fabulous dress at very short notice. She needs it to wear to a function, on the arm of her lover - a high-ranking Nationalist official. This chance meeting is the start of Sira's life of political intrigue...

Let me make something clear right from the start - this is not one of my usual literary tomes. Unfortunately, my first impressions were largely justified, and I spent most of the novel picking faults in Dueñas' style, thinking about how this could have been a better book. The major issue is that the writer is too eager to tell the story to let the story actually be told. A good story unfolds at its own pace, unhurried by the writer's intentions, but Dueñas seems to be pushing The Seamstress along as if she has somewhere to be, and that's quite a feat in a book that runs to more than 600 pages (of admittedly large type). In better hands, this could have been a trilogy of literary tales rather than one plumped-up page turner.

Another worrying problem is the characterisation. The Seamstress is full of two-dimensional, stereotyped supporting players: the educated, possibly gay neighbour; the suave, roguish, seductive lover who abandons Sira; the buxom, matronly housekeeper (and smuggler!) who takes Sira under her wing in Tetouan. Every time the reader is introduced to someone new, Sira gives us just enough details to let us know what kind of person it is before the plot continues on its merry way. Sadly, it's not enough to make us care about any of them a great deal.

I would also argue that the choice of a first-person narrator is a fairly limiting one, forcing the author to resort to a long sequence of monologues, interrupted by the occasional conversation. In one instance, Dueñas obviously realises that this is insufficient, and the chapter moves away from Sira and describes life in Madrid for Rosalinda and her beau. In the final paragraphs of the chapter, we find out how this is done; it's all information Sira has gathered from letters - how convenient...

There are several more issues I had with The Seamstress, but to simply list them here would be overkill, and slightly unfair. You see, for all the problems I had with the book, I did actually read it through to the end, and I ended up enjoying it. As mentioned above, it is a page-turner, in the good sense as well as the bad, and the further the story progressed, the more I wanted to know about Franco-era Spain and Morocco. It's an interesting setting for a World War II thriller, playing out in a country which isn't actually taking part in the conflict (even if it is very clear whose side Spain is actually on).

So is it worth reading? I would argue that this depends very much on the reader. If you crave literary fiction, books which are written in elegant and mesmerising language, painstakingly constructed with vast repositories of hidden meaning, then The Seamstress is definitely not for you. However, if you enjoy historical fiction and ripping yarns, especially those told in the first-person by a young female narrator, you may well get a lot out of this novel (I've had a quick look around the blogosphere, and it appears that I am pretty much alone in my opinion of the book!).

Still, one thing's for sure - I don't think I'll be getting any unrequested ARCs again in a hurry...

A Reflection of Society

2012-01-06T10:00:00.002+11:00

Bloggers are lovely people. A while back, I left a comment on a post on Banana Yoshimoto's The Lake by Lisa from ANZ Lit Lovers, in which I had a little whinge about not receiving a review copy of the book after someone from the publisher's had actually contacted me first. Not only did I get the sympathy I was after (I'm so transparent), but she actually offered to send me her review copy to add to my little library of J-Lit tomes!

Obviously, if the book turned out to be rubbish, I was going to feel very silly indeed. Luckily though, that's not the case. The Lake is a very fine little novel, probably one of the best of the five Yoshimoto works I've read, and a very enjoyable way to spend New Year's Day to boot (I ran through the whole thing in a matter of hours!). Thanks Lisa :)

The Lake (translated by Michael Emmerich) introduces us to Chihiro, a woman approaching thirty, who earns a living painting murals on walls and buildings while she thinks about what she wants to do with her life. As we enter her world, she has just begun a relationship with a neighbour, Nakajima, a rather intelligent young man with a disturbed, and disturbing, past - one that we (and Chihiro) will learn more about as the story progresses. Chihiro senses that Nakajima's fear of intimacy and social situations must be related to some kind of childhood trauma, but she is unwilling to push him into a confession, for fear of hurting him. Then, one day, Nakajima asks Chihiro to accompany him on a journey into the past - a trip to visit some friends living beside a lake...

This journey to the lake is the key to understanding the novel, but Yoshimoto sensibly initially leaves things as vague and murky for the reader as the fog-bound body of water the couple first encounter. We are gradually fed small pieces of information about Nakajima's past, with the truth not coming out until about forty pages from the end. Even then, there are things left unsaid, memories left untouched - and the book is the better for it.

Nakajima is ostensibly the character we should be interested in, but Chihiro herself is also an intriguing creation. While she has not been subjected to the treatment Nakajima was forced to endure, she too, in her own way, has suffered from the way a certain group of people thinks you should live. Living in an unorthodox family unit, simply because her father's family, appalled by her mother's lifestyle, refused to allow him to marry, Chihiro and her parents were left as a perfect nuclear family without the official social sanction.

For anyone who has lived in Japan, or read anything about its customs, the idea of a homogeneous society will be nothing new, and it is this issue which Yoshimoto constantly returns to in her fiction, the way outsiders have to find a place for themselves in a society which would rather they didn't exist. In many ways, the group that takes control of Nakajima is a microcosm of Japan itself, a community unwilling to accept difference and determined to make people conform to its own norms. It is no coincidence that Chihiro and Nakajima are alike in their different approaches to life, or that their goal is to flee to Paris - often the only way for young Japanese to escape the constraints of family and social ties...

As for the lake itself, it's a wonderful piece of imagery and symbolism, almost certainly containing the crux of the whole work - now, if only I knew what that actually was :( Perhaps a clue can be found in the way Mino, one of the friends living by the lake, insists that although the lake may seem still, it is in fact constantly changing with the seasons and with the activity on it - just like society itself... Chihiro's attempt then to recreate the lake in her mural could represent an attempt to reshape society to suit her own wishes and to make a place for the two young lovers to live without fear of outside interference. Then again, I may just have been hitting the literary theory books too hard recently...

Whether any of this makes sense or not, what I've taken from reading The Lake is a sense that this is a very good book, one which lingers in the memory (unlike certain others of Yoshimoto's works) and contains a lot more in its 188 pages than you might think. I'm not sure that it's the kind of book which wins prizes, but it's certainly worthy of its place on the Man Asian Literary Prize long-list. Like the body of water which gives the book its name, there's definitely more to The Lake than meets the eye.

2012 - Plans and Challenges

2012-01-03T10:00:00.010+11:00

A new year is like a blank canvas for bloggers; we are able to forget about the constraints of the last few months and embark on a new reading direction. Sadly, being the people we are, we tend to make elaborate plans and fill up that canvas pretty quickly, leaving ourselves just as hemmed in for space by the end of the year as was the case twelve months earlier... Still, January is a great time for readers, and I always enjoy launching into a new year and wondering what the next twelve months will bring :)

Last year, I only took part in a few challenges, all of which I comfortably completed, and that's the way I like it! To start off 2012, I'll be putting my name down for a few Australian-themed ones, encouraging me to read more local fare. For the third time, I'll be taking part in the Aussie Author Challenge, and I'll also be trying the Australian Women Writers Challenge - if I add the Reading Matters January Australian Literature Month, that'll be three birds with one stone :)

I'm also reserving a little reading space for events which may be coming up later this year. The fifth Japanese Literature Challenge wraps up at the end of January, and given my love of J-Lit, this is another challenge I'll be signing up for when it returns later in the year. I'm also hoping that after the huge success of German Literature Month last November, Lizzy and Caroline will be up for repeating the event at some point in 2012!

That's more than enough to be going on with for the moment as I don't want to fill up my particular canvas in the first week of the new year! However, January is already looking pretty scheduled - I have decided to get the year off to a flying start by reading only books by female writers...

I have already set aside a few books from each of my specialist areas: from J-Lit I have Banana Yoshmoto's The Lake and Yoko Ogawa's Hotel Iris; in the German language I can choose from Herta Müller's Herztier, Christa Wolf's Nachdenken über Christa T. and Jenny Erpenbeck's Heimsuchung (Visitation); for Oz-Lit I have put a hold on Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria at the local library; I also have a couple of Victorian classics up my sleeve in the shape of Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. And if that little lot doesn't take up the whole month, I'm sure I'll be able to find another couple somewhere on my shelves...

That's quite enough planning for one post - I'm off to do some reading... So, what are you all planning to do with 2012?

*****

Post-Script - Although I have no plans to read any more of Haruki Murakami's fiction in 2012 (as I've read it all over the past couple of years!), my arm has been gently twisted, and I will be taking part in Tanabata's Murakami Challenge again this year :)

How, you may ask? Well, I've had a copy of Jay Rubin's Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words sitting on my shelves for a while now, so it's about time it got read. I'm also planning to purchase a couple of his non-fiction titles this year - Underground & What I Talk About When I Talk About Running -, and I may even get around to the anthology of short stories he selected, Birthday Stories.

But that's definitely it...

2012 Challenges

2012-01-01T18:00:00.033+11:00

Here's how I'm faring with the challenges I've signed up for this year :)

Murakami Challenge - January 1st, 2012 - December 31st, 2012
-Toru Level (read any three Haruki Murakami books)

Aussie Author Challenge - January 1st, 2012 - December 31st, 2012
- Dinky-Di Level (read twelve books by six different Australian writers)

Australian Women Writers Challenge - January 1st, 2012 - December 31st, 2012
- Franklin-Fantastic Level (read and review ten books by female Australian writers)
1) Carpentaria by Alexis Wright***
2) Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany***

*** - Eligible for both Aussie challenges

2012 Reading List

2012-01-01T18:00:00.032+11:00

Click on the link to read the review :)
Complete up to 11/2/12

14 - Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany
12a - In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts by Eugen Ruge
12 - Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope
11 - Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
10 - Please Look After Mother by Kyung-Sook Shin
9 - Das Gemeindekind by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
8 - Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany
7 - Silly Novels by Lady Novelists by George Eliot
6 - Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa
5 - Impressions of Theophrastus Such by George Eliot
4 - Carpentaria by Alexis Wright
3 - Nachdenken über Christa T. by Christa Wolf
2 - The Seamstress by María Dueñas
1 - The Lake by Yoko Ogawa

The 2011 Tony's Reading List Awards

2012-01-01T10:00:00.001+11:00

Welcome to the third annual Tony's Reading List Awards, a special time when we celebrate the literary successes of the previous year's reading and shine a light on some rather less impressive books, making sure they get the derision they deserve. It's only fair :)

So, without further ado, let's begin!

First up is the Most-Read Author Award for 2011:

1=) Anthony Trollope and Steven Carroll (5)
3=) Haruki Murakami, Yasunari Kawabata and Franz Kafka (4)

Trollope retains the title he won last year, but only in a tie with first-time contender, Aussie Steven Carroll. With about fifty novels published though, I'd bet Trollope is the more likely to be there or thereabouts again next year :)

Next, it's time for the Most-Read Country Award:

1) Germany (26)

2) England (21)

3) Australia (20)

4) Japan (16)

A big change here in 2011! For the first time, my country of birth has been knocked off its throne, thanks largely to my renewed interest in German-language literature and two (!) G-lit months last year. In fact, England almost fell to third place thanks to a new-found interest in contemporary Australian fiction.

Another interesting statistic is that of the 123 books I read last year, 64 were originally written in a language other than English (of which I read 38 in the original language). For the first time, translated fiction wins!

The Golden Turkey Award goes to the book that was... well, the biggest waste of time this year. This is a highly subjective decision; basically this award goes to the book I most regret having read! 2011 was, by and large a good year for reading, but there were several less-than-excellent books. I eventually came up with a short-list of three contenders:

Praise by Andrew McGahan

Novelle by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist

And the winner (or loser...) is... Michael Kohlhaas! In a bad day for the German nobility, it's Kleist's novella which takes home the drumsticks. Despite a high body count and a meeting with Martin Luther, this is one German classic I won't be rereading in a hurry.

Now it's time to move onto the big one, the Book of the Year, and my task has been made a little easier this year by the introduction of my monthly wrap-up posts. The choice for Book of the Year is limited to my monthly recommendations - all sixteen of them (yes, I know...):

January - The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe

February - Beijing Coma by Ma Jian

March - The Gift of Speed by Steven Carroll

and The Bone People by Keri Hulme

April - When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

May - The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll

June - Silence by Shusaku Endo

July - Adam Bede by George Eliot

August - Leutnant Gustl & Fräulein Else by Arthur Schnitzler

and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

September - Violin Lessons by Arnold Zable

and The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman

October - A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe

and Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig

November - Chess by Stefan Zweig

December - 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

A wonderful collection of books, I'm sure you'll agree :) By nationality, there were four from Japan, four from Australia, three from Austria, two from England and one each from China, the Czech Republic and New Zealand. In terms of writers, both Steven Carroll and Kenzaburo Oe were represented twice on the list.

So, what book takes out the main award? The Book of the Year Award for 2011 goes to:

Steven Carroll's The Glenroy Trilogy :)

Yes, for the third year in a row, I've cheated massively and made a series my book of the year! Apologies to Shusaku Endo and Kenzaburo Oe, but Carroll's trilogy is the one to read. For the record, the trilogy consists of:

The Art of the Engine Driver

The Gift of Speed

The Time We Have Taken

and Spirit of Progress (a prequel to the original trilogy)

Quality contemporary fiction from Down Under - please check it out :)

That's all for 2011: it's time to look forward now and move on into another great year of reading (alternatively, you might want to look back at what I thought of 2009 and 2010...). See you all again throughout 2012!

December 2011 Wrap-Up

2011-12-30T12:00:00.002+11:00

For once, I've been true to my word - December has been a very messy month, with a few new books scattered amongst a bit of rereading and reviewing. In truth, I've just been sorting out odds and ends before starting up again in the New Year (when I will begin my fourth year of blogging!).

2011 has been a fairly good year, despite a couple of lulls in the middle. Over the past four months, I've been getting more visits and page views than ever, the numbers steadily increasing each month. Obviously, I'm doing something right (or I'm checking out my blog myself in my sleep...). Thanks to all who regularly visit and comment :)

I'll be doing my traditional yearly awards at the start of January, so I won't be doing any big retrospective today. However, I will (as usual) be giving you the low down on what happened this month - one last time...

*****
Total Books Read: 6

Year-to-date: 123

New: 4

Rereads: 2

From the Shelves: 3

From the Library: 2

On the Kindle: 1

Novels: 5

Novellas: 0
Short Stories: 1

Non-English Language: 4 (2 Japanese, 1 Spanish, 1 Swedish)

In Original Language: 0

Books read in December were:
1) The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope
2) Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

3) 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (Book One, Book Two, Book Three)

4) Open Door by Iosi Havilio

5) Popular Music by Mikael Niemi

6) The Fix by Nick Earls

Reread and reviewed this month:

Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann

Immensee by Theodor Storm

Reviewed (but not read) this month:

Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor

Murakami Challenge: 1! (4/3)

Aussie Author Challenge: 1 (20/12)

Victorian Literature Challenge: 1 (32/15)
Japanese Literature Challenge 5: 2 (8/1)

Tony's Recommendation for December is: Haruki Murakami's 1Q84

Just six books to choose from, and for a Murakamiphile like me, it was really an easy decision. Yes, 1Q84 is flawed (and I will be debating the pros and cons of the book more in the New Year), but it's still a fascinating book, and one which all fans of the Japanese maestro should read. You're not a fan? Well, that's a different story...

Drop by again in a few days then, to see my look back at 2011, including a few interesting numbers and my choices for both Turkey of the Year (self-explanatory, surely!) and Book of the Year - don't miss it ;)

An Illusion of Freedom

2011-12-28T16:00:00.002+11:00

You may remember that during German Literature Month I reviewed Clemens Meyer's collection of short stories, All the Lights, published by And Other Stories, and while I enjoyed it, didn't really find it my kind of book. However, the other book from the same publishers, the book I had actually asked to be sent, had to wait until late December, pushed down the queue by a whole host of German-language books and a certain Japanese novel you may have heard of...

Argentinian writer Iosi Havilio's Open Door (translated by Beth Fowler), the book I asked to review, is much more my kind of novel. Set in Buenos Aires and a small country town not far from the Argentinian capital, it explores a year in the life of a person whose partner disappears one day, leaving them to start afresh in a small town. They somehow stumble into a relationship with a taciturn macho farmer, spending long days doing housework, taking siestas and researching the history of Open Door, a local low-security mental asylum. Gradually though, attention wanders from the farmer to a teenage girl, a young lady who makes no secret of her attraction to our narrator...

At which point you're probably noticing something unusual in the way this post is unfolding, namely the fact that I haven't actually given you much information about the central character, someone who narrates the story and keeps a lot close to their chest. We never learn their name, and in fact it takes a long time for their gender to be explicitly revealed (even then, I had some serious doubts for a while!). Although the disappearance, and possible suicide, of their girlfriend Aída is the catalyst for the events of the story, there is a sense that things are awry well before this.

It is probably no coincidence that when our friend drifts into the arms of the rugged Jaime, it is in the vicinity of Open Door. After discovering an old book on the 'colony', written in French, a fascination with its workings and history arises, an interest which is more than just a hobby to occupy the time spent waiting for the man of the house to return from work. In fact, as the novel progresses, the line between the colony and the nearby town blurs and disappears, leaving us to wonder whether there is any difference - and where we actually are...

Havilio's style virtually encourages us to indulge in such speculation, the lack of detail hinting that the truth lies somewhere below the surface, and the book our friend discovers, relating the history of the colony, could just as well be telling us about her life. In fact, the distinction between the town and the colony seems relatively unimportant, and if you take it a step further, Havilio is suggesting that we are all, in some way, living in our own little colonies. In the book it says:

"No walls restrict the horizon, nothing to limit the illusion of absolute liberty." p.133

While it is meant to describe the freedom of the patients at Open Door, it may actually be hinting at the illusion most people outside it have of being able to lead free lives...

The relationship the narrator develops with the young Eloísa is also slightly unsettling, seeming as it does to just drift into being, from nowhere (a pattern which many of the events in Open Door follow). An almost violently-sexual affair develops, with the (presumably) older woman fascinated by the misbehaving teenager - who frequently shows that perhaps she would not be out of place at the colony. However, it is Eloísa, unable to understand what our friend is doing living with an old man, who says:

"It's madness. If I didn't know you better I'd say you were wrong in the head." p.185

It's hard not to think that she is on the right track with this comment...

As much as the reader speculates though, the reality is that this is a book which defies interpretation, giving enough up to intrigue us, but nowhere near enough to allow answers to be found. At times, it all feels a little Kafkaesque, but where the Czech writer's characters charge around in a desperate attempt to find out what on earth is going on, Havilio's creations leave the heavy thinking to the reader, preferring to drink, fornicate and enjoy their siestas while we are wondering what to make of it all. Is it a story of post-traumatic stress? Is it an allegory for some aspect of modern life? Are we meant to suspect that we are all actually living inside an asylum?

Don't ask me (I never claimed to know!). Read it for yourself, and you might find out - then again, you might not. In any case, whether you succeed in unravelling the truth or not, you'll certainly have an interesting time :)

A Tortured Mind

2011-12-26T10:00:00.001+11:00

If you mention the words 'Japan' and 'short stories' in the same sentence, the chances are that the name Ryunosuke Akutagawa will not be far away. In terms of importance to the genre (if it is a genre!), Akutagawa is up there with writers like Mansfield, Fitzgerald, Maupassant and Chekhov, despite his untimely death at the age of thirty five. Over the past few weeks, I finally got around to reading a Penguin collection I bought a good while back, Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories, a wonderful introduction to the work of one of Japan's most famous writers, and (after leisurely rereading it in its entirety) I thought I'd jot down some idle thoughts :)

The collection has been divided by the translator, Jay Rubin, into four sections, each containing a few stories representing a certain type of tale. From clever retellings of twelfth-century tales to highly-cathartic personal pieces, the collection is a wealth of fascinating and well-written works, some of which appear here for the first time in English.

The first section, A World in Decay, contains several of Akutagawa's most famous stories, mostly set in the twelfth century, a time when the imperial capital of Kyoto was in decline. Rashomon tells the tale of a dismissed servant sheltering from the rain under the once-magnificent gate of the title (in Kyoto) and the decision he comes to after taking a look upstairs. In a Bamboo Grove is a wonderful creation, where seven differing eye-witness accounts are given for a single crime. The two stories form the basis of Akira Kurosawa's film, Rashomon, with the scene of the title story forming the frame for the longer tale.

The second section, Under the Sword, contains stories set in the early seventeenth century, when the ruling Tokugawas' desire to maintain stability (and power!), led to the implementation of strict behavioural norms, and the persecution of those who followed the recently imported religion of Christianity. In Dr. Ogata Ryosai: Memorandum and O-Gin, we see the two sides of Christian experience in Japan - one a report of a minor miracle, the other telling of a sudden loss of faith. Loyalty, on the other hand, looks at the consequences of failing to choose the good of the group over the individual, consequences which (as you can imagine) are fairly bloody and gruesome....

The final two sections are concerned with more modern fare. The third small group of stories, Modern Tragicomedy, contains three tales set in the early twentieth century, of which Horse Legs, the surreal tale of a man brought back from the dead with some unusual additions, is the stand-out. Finally, Akutagawa's Own Story, six pieces written against the back-drop of the writer's own life, brings the collection to a shuddering, autobiographical (and ultimately untimely...) halt.

It's difficult to give much detail when reviewing such a wide range of stories, but there are probably two which deserve a closer look. Spinning Gears is the final story in the collection, and, running at just over thirty pages, it is also one of the longest. We follow Akutagawa as he spends a week or so in Tokyo, writing a new story at a Western hotel and visiting friends in the capital.

It's a hectic affair, not because of a busy schedule but owing to the unceasing stress the writer is (unnecessarily) putting himself under. Everywhere he goes, he sees patterns - multiple glimpses of men in rain-coats, images of feet with wings, random messages in the pages of books -, and the overall picture is one of a man slowly going mad under the pressure of reconciling his artistic endeavours with his life as a family man. When you know the outcome of this pressure, it makes for sobering reading...

If Spinning Gears is his late classic though, his early masterpiece was the final story in the first section, Hell Screen. In this, the longest story presented here, an unnamed narrator tells us of a horrifying event which happened at a royal court in Kyoto. A wealthy nobleman commands Yoshihide, a famous and eccentric painter, to create a scene on a folding screen depicting the Buddhist hell, and the painter (a man every bit as sadistic and whimsical as the master he serves) comes up with a terrifying masterpiece - but is unable to paint the final, pivotal scene. He returns to his lord and asks the unthinkable; what is even more unthinkable is that his request is approved...

If you are looking for a story which summarises everything that is wonderful in Akutagawa's writing, this is it. A lesser writer could have knocked this off in half the space, but Akutagawa uses his canvas (pun intended) to create a narrator who is quite patently lying to us, a genius who will go to any length to complete a painting, a nobleman determined to get his wicked way with a beautiful serving girl - and a monkey (also called Yoshihide!) who is determined to stop him. Now that's a short story :)

In short, this is a collection which anyone remotely interested in J-Lit or short stories would be well advised to snap up. There aren't all that many contenders for the most famous and popular Japanese writer, but Akutagawa is certainly one of them. One last piece of persuasion? As well as being fully annotated by the admirable Mr. Rubin, this penguin edition also contains an impressive twenty-page introduction by none other than Haruki Murakami. Now if that doesn't clinch the sale, nothing will...

A Portrait of Two Artists as Unloved Men

2011-12-23T18:00:00.004+11:00

Earlier this year, I had one of my periodic bouts of RSI, and as a result, there are several gaps in my reviews for 2011. Now, as we're coming up to the end of the year, I thought it would be nice to go back and revisit a few of the shorter pieces and give them the publicity they deserve, which is why today I'm reviewing a couple of German classics, both concerned with writers and unrequited love...

*****

I read Tonio Kröger on my Kindle a good while back now, but when I saw a cheap edition featuring this story and another of Thomas Mann's novellas, Mario und der Zauberer, I couldn't resist. At the start of Tonio Kröger, our eponymous hero is a young boy growing up in a north-German town, the product of a marriage between a local businessman and a southern-European beauty. Different from the locals in many ways (not least of which is his bi-cultural name), he falls in love with two examples of the Aryan folk around him: the popular Hans Hansen and the beautiful Inge Holm, neither of whom really feel the same way about him.

We fast forward a couple of decades, and now Kröger is a successful writer living in Munich. In an attempt to relax, and get over some writing issues, he decides to take a trip to Denmark (taking in his old hometown on the way), ending up at a quiet coastal resort. One day, after several weeks of tranquillity, a party of guests arrives, shattering the peace and quiet Kröger craves - and among them are two very familiar blond figures...

The story will ring a whole group of bells with anyone who has ever read Death in Venice, and there are many similarities with the more famous novella (although this one has a slightly less depressing ending!). As is often the case in his work, Mann is exploring here the difficulties of being an artist, at the same time drawing deeply on his personal history to paint a picture of a Bohemian from a middle-class family. It can be a little patronising when Kröger looks down on the attempts of working men to create their own little works of art, and his plea to keep literature away from those 'normal', happy folk who don't need it is a little bizarre...

Despite this though, Tonio Kröger is a wonderful piece of writing. You feel as if you are actually there with our unusually-named friend, walking around the old walls of Lübeck in the rain with Hans Hansen, crossing the sea to Denmark on a stormy night, sitting on the beach watching the grey-tipped waves roll in from a grey horizon... It's one of those stories which will be a constant companion in the years to come, a perfect book to curl up with in winter, when all you want is warmth, a cup of tea and a well-written story. Happily, I now have my paper copy for that very purpose - reading it on my Kindle just isn't the same...

*****
...which is not to say that my little electronic friend is not useful in its own right. After all, my first reading of Tonio Kröger was in digital form, and were it not for free e-copies of classics, it's doubtful that I would have got into the author of the next of today's stories.

Earlier this year, I downloaded several of Theodor Storm's short stories and novellas and had a wonderful few days losing myself in his storytelling world. The best (and most famous) of these is Immensee (Lake of Bees), an evocative, and almost painful, tale of missed opportunity. The story, divided up into about eight short sections, is contained within a frame narrative: an old, stern-looking man walks home and goes to his study, where he sits alone in the twilight. When the fading light hits a portrait hanging on the wall, he mutters the name 'Elisabeth' - and memories come flooding back...

The real story then begins, and the reader is taken through the childhood of young Reinhard and his younger neighbour, Elisabeth. The two children spend all their free time together, and it is clear from the start that theirs is a love waiting to happen. Reinhard later leaves to study in the city, and Elisabeth is left behind to wait for his return. Sadly though, a lot can happen in a couple of years - the next time the young couple meet, by the Immensee, Elisabeth is a married woman...

Ouch. It's painful just writing about it :( Not a lot happens in Immensee, but what does happen is unveiled in such wonderful language, such precise, elegant prose, that it stays with the reader long after the story is over. Parallels abound in the story, from the two encounters Reinhard has with gypsy musicians, to the white lily floating in the lake, a beautiful flower which, on closer approach, is unattainable - just like Elisabeth herself. On the last day the pair are to spend together, Reinhard points at the mountains and says:

"Elisabeth... hinter jenen blauen Bergen liegt unsere Jugend. Wo ist sie geblieben?"
"Elisabeth ... behind those blue mountains lies our youth. Where did it go?"

Shortly afterwards, the story ends, and we return to our old man sitting alone in his study, the darkness engulfing him as the black waters of the Immensee once did.

Excuse me while I get myself a tissue...

Lifestyles of the Fairly Rich and not Awfully Famous

2011-12-21T16:00:00.006+11:00

This year, just as in 2010, I decided to take up the Aussie Author Challenge, run by Jo of Booklover Book Reviews, and I'm extremely happy with the results. In 2011, I've managed to read a staggering twenty books by Australian writers, easily my best-ever total, and I'll be back to do it all again next year! So, to finish off the challenge, here are reviews of two more books: one which I didn't get around to reviewing at the time of reading (the only one of my Aussie reads this year without a review...), and one more entertaining novel to finish off the year in style :)

*****

Indelible Ink is a book I heard about in an interview with Christos Tsiolkas, and which I reserved at the library while under the influence of a few glasses of Shiraz one Saturday night. A couple of days later, I read Bree's post on the book and began to have second thoughts about the whole affair (the hangover probably didn't help either). Luckily though, I gave it a go and was pleasantly surprised; it's a book which is well worth the effort.

Indelible Ink is set in the Sydney of a few years back and is centred on Marie, a well-off, middle-aged divorcée. Despite a generous settlement, her lack of a head for numbers means that she has begun to slide into debt, and the only way out is to sell the family home - a multi-million dollar mansion with harbour views. Unable to make up her mind to cast her old life away, she one day decides to get a tattoo - and this is the catalyst for a radical change of lifestyle...

You wouldn't be alone in thinking that Marie doesn't sound all that sympathetic a character (it is difficult to feel sorry for someone who is sitting on - or in - a few million dollars), but luckily that's not the intent. Marie is well aware that the sale is the result of her own shortcomings, and it is her decision to throw caution to the wind (in this case, the lovely breeze coming off the harbour) that wins the reader over. Besides, if you think Marie sounds a little vapid and shallow, just wait until you meet her family and friends.

This review would be a lot longer if I hadn't read the book about six months ago, but you don't really need to know much more about it than the fact that I liked it and would thoroughly recommend it. It's an interesting insight into how the other half lives, and a peep behind the iron curtain the rich keep to cover their private lives, showing the dysfunctionality that lies behind. And we all love a little voyeurism now and then...

*****

The reader is also given a small glimpse of the high life in Nick Earls' latest novel, The Fix. Set, as usual, up in sunny Brisbane, The Fix is a story of a story, and how things are never quite what they seem. Josh has just come back to Australia after a few years working as a spin doctor in London, and while he is waiting to get back into his first love of journalism (and writing a newspaper blog to earn a few bucks in the meantime!), he is approached to carry out a PR campaign for a lawyer receiving a medal for bravery.

For someone used to saving the backsides of big, nasty corporations, it sounds like an easy gig. One problem though is that the lawyer is Josh's old friend Ben, who we suspect may have hurt Josh in the past. As the novel progresses, it's also clear that Ben's reluctance to talk about what happened in the 'siege' has less to do with his feelings towards Josh, and more to do with the truth of the whole affair...

I was a little hesitant on starting this book because Earls is a writer who started off writing lad-lit in the vein of Nick Hornby and Mike Gayle, and I wasn't sure if an older, more literary me would still enjoy his work (Gayle is one whose books I now avoid...). An hour later, and a hundred pages down, I was safely able to take those fears and dump them in the Brisbane river; The Fix is a riveting read.

There were a few uncomfortable moments (I'm not sure a scene with a Korean businessman was strictly necessary, or appropriate), but what I like about Earls is that he has kept his earlier eye for the humorous side of life and combined it with a more developed sense of the darkness that lies beneath it. The longer the book goes on, the more uneasy Ben becomes - and the more obsessed the reader becomes with uncovering the truth. But what is 'truth', and is it ever possible to get to the bottom of anything, particularly someone's character?

On starting this post, I was thinking of writing something about how Earls has moved on from lad-lit and is working towards writing more complex and literary novels, thinking that this one would be another step in the same direction. After finishing the book, I would have to say that I've changed my mind - this is the book that marks him as more than a humorous chronicler of the lives of thirty-something Brisbanites. The descriptive writing may not be as elegant as I might want it to be, but The Fix is a fabulous, multi-layered work which will, I'm sure, stand up to rereading.

And that makes me very happy :)

Rocking Out In The Snow

2011-12-19T16:00:00.001+11:00

Last week, somewhere on the net (alas, my memory has failed me here), I came across a mention of Mikael Niemi's Popular Music, a coming-of-age novel set in the far northern provinces of Sweden, and I decided I wanted to reread it. So I did. Life really can be that simple sometimes :)

I got the book as a Christmas present a good six or seven years ago, and while I remember liking it, I hadn't read it since. On a second reading, it hasn't lost any of its charm; in fact, I probably enjoyed it more this time around. Popular Music (translated by Laurie Thompson) follows Matti - a thinly disguised Niemi, no doubt -, a young Swedish boy beginning to move through the treacherous time between childhood and manhood.

Living in an Arctic village so remote that most Swedes would have trouble pin-pointing it on the map, the male residents of Pajala are encouraged to be manly and, above all, to avoid any activity regarded as knapsu (unmanly, effeminate or - my preferred interpretation - poncy). Probably not a good idea to be the lead singer of a pre-pubescent rock band then...

The book is structured into a series of loosely-linked stories, following Matti (and his best friend Niila) from elementary-school days to late teens, and the narrator tells the story in the first-person, looking back at his distant youth. However, he's not always your standard narrator; at times, he can go off into flights of fantasy, and some of the earlier stories seem to be told more by the boy than the man (unless you believe that Matti really did spend a winter cooped up in an old boiler before bursting out in the Spring!).

Life in the region of Tornedalen was not a particularly easy one, and although Niemi's style is light and playful, the events he describes are not always so fluffy. In an area of great isolation, alcoholism, casual sex and violence are rife, and while Matti himself has a relatively normal family and upbringing, some of his friends, in particular the hapless Niila, appear lucky to reach adulthood unscathed. Of course, a part of growing up is learning how to cope with adversity, and it isn't long before Niila and his brothers start to rebel against their strict and unnecessarily cruel upbringing...

Another interesting result of the isolation is the cultural and linguistic diversity on display. Marooned in the frozen north, close to the Finnish border, the residents are seen as country hicks by those from the south, and this is shown in the school scenes, where the children who can only speak Finnish (or the local dialect) are hesitant to even open their mouths.

Of course, this goes both ways, and the northerners are scornful of the 'soft' Southerners, with their fancy inventions like electric saunas... When the families gather for weddings or funerals, the interplay between the various family members, those who emigrated, those who moved to Gothenburg or Stockholm, and those who stayed behind in Pajala, is a fascinating study for anyone interested in intercultural communication. Or domestic arguments ;)

In the end though, Popular Music is primarily about Matti and his friends in the band. As the years go by, Matti and Niila are joined by the guitar prodigy Holgeri and the rhythmically-challenged (but usefully-muscled) Erkki on drums, and by the end of the story, our fab four have finally started to perform real music in front of actual audiences. We leave them (literally!) at a crossroads, flat out in the snow with the whole world ahead of them. Despite a rather poignant epilogue, it is this image of joy and hope that the reader takes with them on finishing the book. And a wonderful one it is too...

1Q84 (Book Three) - Anthony Trollope Allays Your Moral Concerns

2011-12-15T12:00:00.001+11:00

Recently, a document of remarkable literary importance was found in an old house in Tokyo. Incredibly, as strange as this may sound, it appears to have a bearing on a modern work of literature. Scholars are currently authenticating the document in the hope of unravelling its meaning...

Good evening, one and all. My name is Anthony Trollope, and I recently received a request to rewrite the third volume of a remarkable novel which has just come to light. It is not my usual work - I am more of a writer than a rewriter -, but, as we all know, even Shakespeare wrote for money! The reason for this most peculiar task is that my editor (a fine fellow) has high hopes for this young chap; however, he feels that his writing is most inappropriate for a readership raised on good, stout English principles, and it is my duty to amend the text to make it safer, and more palatable, for the public at large.

Let me tell you all a little about the author and his novel. His name, according to my editor, is Mr. Haruki Murakami, and I am led to believe that he is an educated young man from the islands of Japan. He has produced a most imaginative piece of writing entitled "1Q84", where the title refers to an alternative 1884, one in which Japan is a most civilised country (and not the barbarian backwater it is now!). In choosing to place the action of his novel in the future, young Mr. Murakami has taken certain liberties with what is acceptable in polite society, and it is precisely this aspect of his work which I will be discussing today. The antics his characters get up to are certainly very far from the way we live now!

There are two main characters in "1Q84", Miss Aomame and Mr. Tengo Kawana, and it is with Miss Aomame that I would like to begin today. It really is an indictment on Mr. Murakami that an attractive young woman should be left unchaperoned to wander around the metropolis, and I am afraid that the disgraceful consequences which arise from this are a clear lesson to us all of the folly of giving young ladies more independence. Not content with "working" for a living, she is even permitted to live completely alone! I intend to introduce a sprightly duenna, Lady Murasaki, who will be able to keep a watchful eye on our murderous young reprobate - there will be no wandering the streets of Tokyo on her watch!

I am also extremely concerned about young Mr. Kawana, a man who really should be making more of his life, what with his undoubted mental capacity and literary prowess. It troubles me to see the time he wastes on unnecessary thought, when he should be devoting all of his energies to the literary arts. A man with such an inordinate amount of leisure time and no published novel! I am currently working on three manuscripts in addition to this minor rewriting task!!!

Of course, my readership would be most keen for this romance to come to its natural conclusion. Young Tengo, as befits a gentleman, will do the honest thing by Lady Murasaki's charge, and the culmination of my version of the novel will be the wedding of Mr. Kawana and Miss Aomame at Barchester Cathedral. Quite how I intend to get them there is an issue I am yet to resolve - but you may rest assured that there will be no suspicion of any bump under the wedding gown...

However, the moral intransigence of "1Q84" is by no means limited to our two young friends, I'm afraid. There is a wide cast of minor characters, many of whom will need to be considerably rewritten if they are not to offend the delicate nature of our potential readers. ~~Miss Havisham~~ The Dowager, a wonderfully-drawn widow, is perhaps one of the least offensive and morally corrupt personages, and it is wonderful to see how she has established an abode for women who have failed to fulfil their marital duties, providing them with a home until they are ready to return to the rigours of their home obligations. Perhaps we could tone down the mercilessly-seeking-out-and-killing-overbearing-husbands part though - a gentle ticking-off, delivered by an amiable policeman, should do the trick.

Now, one man who would be quite at home in an English three-volume novel is the fascinating Mr. Ushikawa, the gentleman (although I use the expression in the loosest sense) with the shabby attire and a marvellously misshapen head. Despite his uncouth behaviour, I admire Mr. Ushikawa greatly. He is a most fascinating creation, and, were I to be cynical, I would suspect that our old friend Mr. Dickens might have had a role in assisting young Murakami in his formation. I really cannot see any pressing need to change his character at all; however, I'm sure my audience would enjoy his demise more if the lodgings he meets his fate in were a tad darker and even more insalubrious.

Another character who will have to learn his place is the Dowager's valet, Mr. Tamaru. Quite why our valiant widow should have selected such a queer fish to serve in her establishment is beyond me, and I shall be making certain that this scoundrel gets his just desserts. I should think that a short spell in one of his Imperial Majesty's prisons will do the trick - either that or transportation (does Japan have any colonies? I must ask Mr. Murakami about this). What's that you say? Wouldn't he be hung for his crime? Oh dear me, no, these are more enlightened times - sodomy is a relatively minor offence these days...

There is a lot for me to work out here, but I do think that I shall be able to make a fairly passable story out of this last volume. By making the alterations mentioned above, and smoothing out a few of the rougher edges (I shall certainly be removing all of this nonsense about the 'Little People' - I mean, really!), the book should be ready for serialisation within a month or so. Oh, and of course we will be adding a hunting scene (perhaps a thrilling chase after a cunning fox - or cat! - around Shibuya station? That sounds like a nice, leafy estate for a run.). I shall let you know how it all goes once I have completed the task.

I just hope I have the time to give it the justice it deserves. I recently had an idea for a series of books about a politician, and I suspect that I may get a little distracted from the task in hand. Wait - now if I also added an Irishman and a story about some missing diamonds...

The document ends abruptly here. We will inform the public of any discoveries we make regarding the writing of this invaluable piece of literary history.

1Q84 (Book Two) - A Brief Chat with Mr. Ushikawa

2011-12-12T18:00:00.001+11:00

You, the reader, are seated in a rather uncomfortable plastic chair in a rather depressing-looking room. Having arrived to complain about Book Two of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, you were shown into this room and asked to take a seat. The room is fairly dark, despite the sunlight coming in from between the blinds over the window, and it actually takes a good minute or two before you realise that you are not alone...

Over in a corner, a man is smoking a cigarette - as your eyes start to adjust, you see a packet of Seven Stars on the table. But it is the man, not the cigarette packet that draws your attention. Dressed in a crumpled old grey suit, which looks like it has spent the last few years screwed up in a bottom drawer, the man is perhaps one of the most unusual (and disturbing) figures you have seen in a good while. His head has a most unusual shape - lumpy, asymmetrical -, and his bushy eyebrows almost join, reaching towards each other across the wrinkle-lined space above his bulbous nose...

As the smoke from the cigarette drifts over to you, you wrinkle up your nose, ready to ask the man to put it out. However, before you do, the man begins to speak...

"I do apologise, a filthy habit I know, but what can you do?" He raises his eyebrows, stubs out the cigarette (on what looks suspiciously like a rubber plant), and walks across to the table. "I apologise for the inconvenience," he says, waving an arm languidly around the room, "but we have no better room free at the moment - the Foundation is currently very busy... Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Ushikawa." He leans across the table, offering his hand to be shaken. You stare at him, unwilling to reciprocate. "Ah, yes, I understand." He drops his hand and sits down in the chair opposite you. And smiles. A mouthful of uneven, yellowing teeth appear, like a set of dirty dominoes in a worn black box. He continues talking, leaning earnestly across the table.

"I understand that you are, shall we say, less than satisfied with the second book, and I fully understand that, I really do," he smiles, trying to convince you of his apparent understanding with a display of his uneven teeth, "but I think it would be very rash to give up on Mr. Murakami's work so close to the end. I do understand," he quickly spits out, trying to preempt the objection rising in your throat, "that you are a very busy person and that you have a limited amount of time to spend on reading and reviewing - we at the foundation, and my employers, have a great deal of respect for your ability and judgement as a blogger," - a pause, and another smile - " however, we feel that perhaps you have been somewhat negatively influenced by certain, shall we say, unfortunate reviews which may have been written recently..."

You shift position slightly in your chair, showing a little impatience at Ushikawa's manner, but he appears calm and cheerful, unaware of the hostility you are projecting. He sits back in his chair, puts his hands on his knees and continues with his virtual monologue. "Now I'm sure that one of your main problems was the pace of the narrative... is that the right word, 'narrative'?" You nod, almost involuntarily. Ushikawa smiles again. "Yes, that's right, the slow narrative." A pause. "But, you see, while unfortunate , this waiting was most unavoidable. Aomame's meeting with Leader, this was the focal point of the novel, the point to which all roads were leading, and, indeed, from which they all moved away. It is inevitable, is it not, that the writer would want to create some tension, to give the scene the weight it deserves, no?"

Ushikawa leans forward slowly, spreading his stick-like arms wide in an apparent act of supplication. You nod your head slightly, and then kick yourself for doing so. Ushikawa smiles again, that wide, eery display of the mangled ivory, and nods himself, as if in acknowledgement of a job well done.

"I would imagine that another of the issues you may have with the book is one of repetition", Ushikawa continues. "The two moons, the scene in the classroom...", he smiles again, almost a leer this time, "even the rather unflattering descriptions of me and my misshapen head... But you see, this is a very long book. I agree, the lengthy speech Tengo gives beside his father's sick bed, or rather", he interrupts himself, "a kind of soliloquy, a ponderous recap of all that has happened to him - yes, that may be a little unnecessary..." He pauses and looks you in the eye. "I am quite sure that you, as a very intelligent reader and writer, are in no need of such repetition, but you have to think of others, those who do not read so regularly, or perhaps so quickly. Do you not see a need for a little aid to the memory on occasion?".

On saying this, Ushikawa tilts his head to one side, shrugs his shoulders and extends his arms to the side, grinning his eery smile. He holds this pose for what seems like an eternity until, out of sheer embarrassment, you give a slight, barely perceptible nod. This slightest of movements, however, appears to satisfy him. He settles back into his chair, crosses his legs and looks up at the ceiling, as if to ponder his next words. You watch as the yellowing fingers on his right hand move rapidly and smoothly, a somewhat worrying action until you realise that he is playing with an imaginary cigarette...

"Of course," he says in a somewhat disconsolate voice, "I can see why you may be offended by certain events in this section of the book, events of a, shall we say, sexual nature?" He glances over at you, raising his large, bushy eyebrows so high that they almost disappear into the mass of hair on the top of his misshapen head. You squirm in your seat and look away, concentrating your gaze on the rubber plant in the corner. Ushikawa smiles and carries on.

"Whether you are offended with what happens, or just with the clumsy way in which Mr. Murakami expresses it, I can fully understand, but I can assure you that there is a method in his madness...". You look up, intrigued despite yourself. Ushikawa smirks and says "Yes, I too know a little Shakespeare...". He winks, and you slouch down in your chair, wishing you were somewhere, anywhere else.

"Yes, if you read further, you will see that all is not quite as it appears. The, ahem, intercourse featured is there for a reason, it's a somewhat pivotal point of the plot. I do understand that this scene can appear a little distasteful, especially given the age of one of the... participants," Ushikawa raises his eyebrows again, sending you further into your seat, "but perhaps your cultural sensitivities are a little different to ours. I am not making excuses, I am just giving explanations." He shrugs. "I am merely following the orders of those who employ me..."

You lean forward, and, for the first time, you decide to speak. "But that's not really enough, Mr. Ushikawa. Can't you explain a little more, enough to make me think it's really worthwhile continuing with the book?" Ushikawa sits back and beams, his yellow teeth shining in all their gaping glory. He waits a moment, obviously enjoying himself, before standing up and leaning towards you. "If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation...", he says, and turns towards the door. As he takes a few steps towards the exit, you decide to ask one last question...

"Why should I trust you, Mr. Ushikawa?"

He stops, turns to face you and stares deep into your eyes. All traces of his smile are gone; only a tired, time-worn face remains. He waits, staring until, abashed, you have to lower your eyes. He sighs and replies, "Well, if you read Book Three, you may well find out...". With this, he leaves the room.

You stay seated, Ushikawa's last words echoing around your head. And - just as Ushikawa knew you would - you decide to give 1Q84 one last try...

1Q84 (Book One) - Split-Decision

2011-12-08T16:00:00.001+11:00

It is getting late, and Tony is still pacing around his study, mulling over the events of Book One of Haruki Murakami's latest novel, 1Q84. He is tired, but he feels that he won't be able to sleep until he at least begins to get some ideas down,

so he walks over to the computer and begins typing...

so he walks over to the computer... then he changes his mind. The next day, after a good sleep, some exercise and a light dinner, he decides to spend the evening typing up his review...

1Q84 is, so far at least, a rather intriguing book (fairly intimidating in its gargantuan physical appearance) and both familiar and unfamiliar to those who have already spent many an evening exploring Murakami's worlds. At the start of the novel, Aomame, a twenty-nine-year-old woman, is sitting in a taxi, stuck in traffic in mid-eighties' Tokyo. On the advice of her driver, she gets out and climbs down an emergency ladder by the side of the expressway. From this moment on, the world she is living in seems somewhat unusual, different from the one she is used to, and she decides to name this reality 1Q84, with the Q standing for question mark.

Meanwhile, Tengo, a young maths teacher with literary aspirations, is asked by his editor to polish up a first novel by a mysterious young writer. Despite his initial hesitation, he decides to accept the task, one which leads him into a series of bizarre occurrences, which may or may not have something to do with a mysterious cult. Oh, and there might also be a link to Aomame there somewhere too...

Tony writes that if you were in a critical mood, it would be easy to think that Murakami is repeating himself here, as anyone with more than a passing knowledge of his back catalogue will be able to spot parallels with earlier works. Tony  decides to focus on the wonderful parallels with Murakami's earlier  works and the way in which the writer has taken ideas and themes from  other novels and integrated them here in what will probably turn out to  be a much more ambitious and fascinating novel. 

Evil cult?  Try his non-fiction work, Underground.  Mysterious old lady and talented young man providing an unusual and discreet service?  I'll raise you Cinnamon and Nutmeg from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  Dual-stranded plot, and alternating chapters with a fantasy slant?  Hard-Boiled Wonderland..., anyone?  By opting for a two-strand approach to the novel, one previously used in Hard-Boiled Wonderland..., Murakami opens up more scope to pursue his ideas, and he is able to use the themes he has worked on in his past fiction to work around the fascinating topic of one of his non-fiction books, the rise of the cult in modern Japan.  Obviously, Murakami-san is a little light on new ideas...

...and this new book is full of info-dumping, long paragraphs of 'necessary' information, thrown into the path of the narrative, bringing it to a shuddering halt, and, of course, running at over 900 pages in this version, 1Q84 is a densely-plotted book, with a wide selection of characters and appropriate pacing - if you're going to cover 900+ pages of writing, you don't want to push things along too quickly at the start!

Of the two main characters, Tengo is the more familiar to Murakami lovers, another example of the writer's everyman characters, ordinary men thrust into extraordinary situations, a pale shadow, a bad imitation of earlier characters like Toru Okada or the 'boku' of Murakami's early fiction. A time-wasting, unambitious teacher, too weak to actually break into the literary world, things just happen to him, and he is actually slightly more distanced than Murakami's usual protagonists, allowing us to be a little more detached, not looking over his shoulder, allowing us to see more of him than is usually the case (perhaps something which makes him more three-dimensional?).

Aomame is a rather more intriguing development though. Several of Murakami's earlier works featured young women as secondary characters, many of them slightly kooky and special (for example, the pink-loving home-schooled grand-daughter in Hard-Boiled Wonderland..., or the precocious neighbour in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), but here we have one of these bit parts elevated to centre stage, and it shows that Murakami struggles with writing believable women because Aomame is a very thin character. While Tengo is a knock-off, at least he is a well-rounded one - Aomame could be ripped directly from a straight-to-video Hollywood/Kung Fu movie...

And Murakami's demeaning attitude towards women just gets worse with the way he has Aomame and Yuki sleep around, the constant references to needing sex, the unnecessary lesbian experiences. At times, you think the story is turning into soft porn, but the more you read, the more you realise that these outward shows of sexuality may be rooted in something deeper, and darker. The slow pace of the novel allows the writer to gradually reveal elements of his characters' earlier lives, changing what could be pornographic into thought-provoking and worrying. And as we are in 1Q84 (and not 1984!), we're never really sure how much of the action to take on face value...

Tony stands up, stretches and walks over to the window in his study.

Tony stands up, stretches and walks over to the window in his study.

He yawns, rubs his eyes and starts as thunder cracks outside.

He yawns, rubs his eyes and starts as thunder cracks outside.

Wanting to look out at the approaching storm, he opens the blinds -

Wanting to look out at the approaching storm, he opens the blinds -

He stops, puzzled.
Somehow, the sky looks slightly odd tonight...

Diamonds Are A Girl's Worst Enemy

2011-12-05T18:00:00.002+11:00

After a hard month reading and reviewing German literature, it's time to kick off my shoes and slip into something a little more comfortable, and those of you who have been around my blog for a while will know that there's little I find as comforting as a reread of some of my favourite Victorian literature. So today, for the third time this year, we're heading back into Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels for a little R & R - slippers please...

*****
The Eustace Diamonds is the third of Trollope's 'political' Palliser novels, but it is perhaps the least political of them all. The story centres around Lady Elizabeth Eustace (known to her friends as Lizzie), a young, beautiful widow, who has made her fortune by capturing the hand of a Lord, shortly before his death through dissipation. Not content with being left money, property and a regular income in her husband's will, Lizzie decides to appropriate a diamond necklace which is in her possession at the time of her husband's death - an ornament which the family lawyers are not prepared to let her have.

Lizzie, attempting to brazen out the situation, decides that her case will be better served by finding a new partner to fight her battles for her; the only problem is that the men she considers as potential partners all want her to give the diamonds back. As the cunning Lady regards her potential beaus (the dull but steady Lord Fawn, her manly barrister cousin Frank Greystock, and the slightly dangerous Lord George de Bruce Carruthers), she continues to fight off the best attempts of the lawyers to seize the jewels. Until, that is, someone else takes an interest in the precious stones...

I'll get it out in the open at once - The Eustace Diamonds is one of my least favourite Trollope books. I had that feeling before starting it this time, and my opinion certainly hadn't changed by the time I got to the last page. Although the Pallisers are mentioned several times over the course of the two volumes, the reality is that this is a stand-alone novel, and one which (in my opinion) overstays its welcome.

The key to the novel is the character of Lizzie Eustace, a no-good, cunning, treacherous gold-digger, who would remind any well-read Victorian of Thackeray's own villainess, Becky Sharpe. To succeed in her intrigues though, Lizzie needs the men surrounding her to be almost as bad as she is, and this is where Trollope falls down a little in this book. The world seems incapable of doing anything about Lizzie's antics, and despite Trollope's constant explanations as to why people are content to have the wool pulled over their eyes, it feels like a bit of a hollow argument.

Of course, it's not all bad (I wouldn't be reading it if it was...). Lizzie is gradually worn down over the course of time by the pressure of having to fight for 'her' diamonds, and the writer describes Lizzie's psychological ordeal perfectly. In fact, the diamonds almost become a character in their own right, one whose whereabouts are of pivotal importance to the story. The idea of an item of great value becoming a burden not worth keeping, but equally something which you cannot part from, is not exactly unique in literature (my precious...), and Trollope almost makes you pity poor Lizzie - but not quite ;)

As always, Trollope also has a keen eye for the problems of Victorian women in their quest to be well married and less of a burden for those who must support them. Quite apart from Lizzie's own need for a husband, there are several other marriage sub-plots, not all of which end well. In particular, the frightening engagement of Lucinda Roanoake, a beautiful young American, and Sir Griffin Tewett, a brutal aristocrat, a 'romance' which ends with suspected mental illness, is one to put you off marriage for life...

At the end of the day though, I was very glad to get to the end of the novel, anticipating happier times when the series moves on to the next stop, Phineas Redux, featuring the return of our Irish friend Phineas Finn. And, coincidentally, it was a character from Phineas Finn, Lord Chiltern, who best summed up my feelings about The Eustace Diamonds on the very last page:

"I never was so sick of anything in my life as I am of Lady Eustace. People have talked about her now for the last six months... And all that I can hear of her is, that she has told a lot of lies and lost a necklace."

I couldn't have put it better myself :)

November 2011 Wrap-Up - German Literature Month

2011-12-01T18:00:00.001+11:00

November (of course) has been dominated by German Literature Month, and this is reflected in my list for the month - not a word of English to be seen :) I have thoroughly enjoyed my few weeks of Teutonic texts, but I'm also glad to have it behind me as I really need a break from the frequent posting it entailed ;)

It would be remiss of me to end the month without a shout-out to the wonderful organisers of the whole affair, Lizzy and Caroline. I'm sure it was a nightmare keeping everything running smoothly, and it didn't show at all: DANKE SCHÖN!!!

Seriously though, it has been a wonderful opportunity to discuss German-language books, something that can be difficult (certain of my G-Lit posts in the past have generated exactly zero comments...). I've also found a lot of new bloggers who read and review the same kind of books I do - a relief after the disaster that was BBAW...

I greatly enjoyed the two read-alongs, the first I've participated in, as it was refreshing to get to see so many different opinions on one book. I was even inspired to watch a film version of one of the books - even if it was a rather old, staid adaptation ;) You want more? How about my three-part Kafka tribute play? Or my first ever post in German? Now that is one busy month!

I get the feeling you're still expecting something else though... Oh, alright, here are the numbers :)

*****
Total Books Read: 11

Year-to-date: 117

New: 11

Rereads: 0

From the Shelves: 6

From the Library: 0

On the Kindle: 5

Novels: 3

Novellas: 7
Short Stories: 1

Non-English Language: 11 (11 German)

In Original Language: 11 (11 German)

Books read in November were:
1) Das Schloß by Franz Kafka (Act One, Act Two, Act Three, Director's Cut)

2) Der Schuß von der Kanzel by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer

3) Die schwarze Spinne by Jeremias Gotthelf

4) Der Sonntag, an dem ich Weltmeister wurde by F.C. Delius

5) Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

6) Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist

7) Die Marquise von O... by Heinrich von Kleist

8) Das Erdbeben in Chili by Heinrich von Kleist

9) Schachnovelle by Stefan Zweig

10) Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler

11) Der Engel schwieg by Heinrich Böll

October books in the German Literature Month:
Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht by Alois Hotschnig
All the Lights (Die Nacht, die Lichter) by Clemens Meyer
Und sagte kein einziges Wort by Heinrich Böll
Bahnwärter Thiel & Der Apostel by Gerhart Hauptmann

Murakami Challenge: 0 (3/3)

Aussie Author Challenge: 0 (19/12)

Victorian Literature Challenge: 3 (31/15)
Japanese Literature Challenge 5: 0 (6/1)

Tony's Recommendation for November is: Stefan Zweig's Schachnovelle

I had a good think about this one! I thoroughly enjoyed the Gothic stylings of Die schwarze Spinne, and as an introduction to Stefan Zweig, Schachnovelle was a real pleasure. However, I'm a big fan of Fontane's work (and a big fan of novels over novellas), so his classic story of marriage and betrayal just about squeaks home as Klassenprimus this month. ~~But only just :)~~ Sorry, there's been a recount. After rereading Schachnovelle, I've decided that Zweig is the winner by a nose. No correspondence will be entered into ;)

December? Rest, a slow-down in posting, and a fair proportion of rereading old friends I suspect. Mind you, I've said that before...

We Are The Champions, My Friend(s)

2011-11-30T18:00:00.348+11:00

As the bus heads back into Germany, it's time for one last journey to round off German Literature Month...

[Hisses, screeches and various high-pitched noises. Hmm, it appears the simultaneous translation unit on the bus has finally packed up - no wonder after a month's hard work...]

Na ja, weiter geht's. Kurz vor Beginn des Monats der deutschsprachigen Literatur, hat eine Bloggerin mich aufgefordert etwas auf deutsch zu schreiben. Natürlich, habe ich die Idee sofort kategorisch abgelehnt, aber da einer unseren Reiseführerinnen, Lizzy, sich an genau diese mutige Tat gewagt hat, musste ich noch einmal darüber nachdenken. Deswegen (nur deswegen - und zum ersten und allerletzten Mal) gibt es heute in Tony's Reading List eine Rezension in der deutschen Sprache - auch wenn es mir höchstwahrscheinlich nicht ganz fehlerfrei gelingen wird...

*****

Der Sonntag, an dem ich Weltmeister wurde ist eine autobiographische Erzählung von Friedrich Christian Delius, der Autor von dem mittlerweile auch in der englischen Sprache ziemlich bekannten Buch Bildnis der Mutter als junge Frau. Das Ganze spielt sich im Laufe eines einzigen Tages ab, aber es ist kein normaler Tag - denn am 4. Juli 1954 fand in Bern das Endspiel der Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft statt, bei dem die Deutsche Nationalmannschaft, die absolute Außenseiter, gegen die legendäre Ungarische Auswahl auftreten musste.

An diesem Tag, wird ein elf-jähriger Junge (vermutlich Delius selber) um sieben Uhr früh von Kircheglocken in der Kleinstadt Wehrda in Hessen plötzlich (und widerwillig) erweckt. Als der junge Pfarrerssohn zu seinen Sinnen kommt, erinnert er sich an das Endspiel, und danach tut er sein bestes um durch den langweiligen Sonntag zu kommen, bis er sich das Spiel im Radio anhören darf.

Dass ein Junge in die Kirche geht, und danach zweistundenlang vor dem Radio hockt, klingt nicht besonders interessant, aber Delius (natürlich) hat viel mehr zu sagen. Die Erzählung hat mit einem Wendepunkt zu tun - die Zeit wo die Westdeutschen, vielleicht zum ersten Mal seit dem Ende des Krieges, sich als Sieger fühlen durften. Für unseren jungen Freund ist es aber auch ein Wendepunkt, da dieser Sonntag der Anfang von einem geistigen Kampf wird. Der Junge, streng religiös erzogen, wird zum ersten Mal von anderen Göttern versucht - elf Männern und deren Trainer...

Das Thema von Fußball als Religion wird öfters im Laufe der Geschichte erwähnt. Unser junger Held ist verblüfft als er bei einer Parade des deutschen Torwarts Turek hört:

"Turek, du bist ein Teufelskerl! Turek, du bist ein Fußballgott!" s.93, Rowohlt (2004)

Zuerst hat der Kerl angst, dass er beim Radio hören sündigt, besonders als der Reporter, erinnernd an den goldenen Kalb, sagt das Turek Gold wert sei. Allmählich aber, beginnt er richtig mitzufiebern, und bis dem Ende des Buches (und des Spiels), hat der Fußballfan den frommen Pfarrerssohn längst beiseite geschoben.

Dem Reporter hat der Torwart offensichtlich mächtig imponiert, da immer wieder von Turek die Rede ist. Am Anfang des Spieles, lesen wir wie:

"Er hob seine große, segnende Wunderhände...", s.53

Na ja, dass der Torwart in solchen Worten beschrieben wird, sollte eigentlich keine Überraschung sein - jeder weiß dass Jesus rettet... (Entschuldigung bitte!)

Aber das Spiel wird nicht nur in religöser Sprache beschrieben, sondern auch als ein Art Krieg. In der Zeitung am Vorabend stehen solche Sprüche wie "Sind die Ungarn zu stoppen?" und "Deutsche Nationalelf will den Himmel stürmen." (s.63/4), und später lobt der reporter die "Angriffsmaschine" (s.93) der Ungarn. So was kommt ja vor im Sport, aber wenn der Leser das alles vergleicht, mit dem was zu der Zeit draußen in der Welt passierte, ist das einem fast peinlich. An den Krieg, obwohl er eigentlich längst Geschichte geworden ist, wird man jeden Tag erinnert, entweder von der leeren Stuhl am Tisch beim Essen oder von den vorbeigehenden Amputierten in den Straßen. Und da die Ostzone "...gleich hinter den nächsten Bergen..." (s.37) ist, ist die Rede von Angriff und Abwehr besonders zutreffend...

Legen wir aber die weitere, weltliche Bedeutung der Behandlung zur Seite, da das Buch genau so viel spricht über die Probleme des Jungens als die der Welt. Das arme Kind hat etliche Probleme - er hat Schuppen an Knien und Ellenbogen, er ist ziemlich klein und ungeschickt, und (was viel schlimmer ist) er stammelt und stottert. Für ihn ist das Spiel eine Rettung aus dem alltäglichen Leben, wo Andere für ihn spielen können. In diesem Hinsicht, erinnert mich Der Sonntag, an dem ich Weltmeister wurde an David Mitchells Black Swan Green (obwohl Mitchells Erzählung sich über dreizehn Monaten ausspannt, wo Delius alles in zehn Stunden abspielen lässt). Es kommt als eine Erleichterung, aber keine Überraschung, als der Junge, ganz im Ballfieber, die befürchtete Silben "zwei zu zwei" leicht aussprechen kann. Offensichtlich wirkt Ballfieber wie eine Impfung gegen das Stammeln...

Als ich Bildnis der junge Frau als Mutter las, habe ich Delius poetischen Stil sehr genossen, und dieses Werk hat meine Meinung nicht geändert (sondern verstärkt!). Ich bin wirklich froh, dass ich einen solchen Autor entdeckt habe (na ja, vielleicht wurde er mir eher vorgestellt...), und ich freue mich schon auf das nächste Buch... oder, besser gesagt, Bücher. Denn ich habe letzte Woche eine Sammlung von drei seiner früheren, politischen Romanen gekauft, und ich schätze, dass das nächste Buch nicht auf sich warten lässt ;)

*****

Und das war es, liebe Freunde - das Monat der deutschsprachigen Literatur ist aus. Die Reise ist vorbei und unser alter Bus muss dringend zum Werkstatt ;) Es hat alles enorm Spaß gemacht, und ich habe viele tolle BloggerInnen und Bücher kennengelernt. Vielleicht nächstes Jahr mal wieder?

More Than a Game

2011-11-29T18:00:00.001+11:00

One thing which has rapidly risen to the top of my things-to-do list in recent weeks is familiarising myself with the basics of psychoanalysis. Why? Because it is becoming increasingly clear that the key to understanding Austrian literature is having a passing knowledge of the theories of a certain Sigmund Freud. Arthur Schnitzler, a contemporary of the good doctor, is certainly fascinated by his characters' thought processes, and Alois Hotschnig's short-story collection, Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht, could also be seen in this light. It was no surprise then to find that my third Austrian writer of the month was himself no stranger to egos, super-egos and ids ;)

*****

Stefan Zweig is a writer that I had never heard of at the start of this year. However, his books seem to have been everywhere recently (among the blogs I frequent anyway), and I have been very keen to sample his work for a while now. Luckily, I won a copy of Schachnovelle (Chess) recently, allowing me to have a little taste of Zweig's style. It's a style that I could become extremely fond of...

On a passenger ship travelling from New York to Buenos Aires, an Austrian, the novel's narrator, becomes fascinated by a fellow passenger, the current world chess champion. Determined to make his acquaintance, our friend lures him into playing a game against some of the passengers. Of course, Czentovic, a Hungarian prodigy, casually defeats the group in the first game, but in the second game, some assistance from a casual passer-by helps the group to obtain a draw. And it's here that the game really begins...

Alas, I simply don't have the time, energy or willpower to give this book the treatment it deserves. Schachnovelle is simply brilliant. In its contrast of the two chess geniuses, the dogmatic, automaton-like Czentovic, and the self-taught, half-crazed Dr. B, Zweig not only symbolises the eternal clash of art and science, but also lays bare the events of Hitler's annexation (Anschluß) of Austria - I kid you not.

The middle part of the book is a story within a story, in which Dr. B, who hasn't actually picked up a chess piece for twenty years, explains how he developed his incredible chess ability. It's closely connected with Austria's subsumption into the Third Reich, and as a study of the horrors of nothingness, it is without parallel. Let's just say that it is possible to be bored out of your mind...

So when the good Doctor, a man who struggles to connect the wooden pieces in front of him to the abstract notions in his head, sits across the board from the self-taught idiot savant, unique among chess Grand-masters in being unable to play a game without actually seeing the board, it is more than just a friendly game to pass the time - ideologies and psychologies come face to face (and don't much like what they see).

As the game progresses, it becomes clear that Dr. B is more than a match for the world champion when it comes to pure chess ability. But is that all you need to make it to the top? Or is animal cunning, a thick hide and a lot of patience actually more important in the long run? Who will come out on top? I won't tell you that, but the big match is certainly an absorbing contest to watch.

And that's not all Schachnovelle has to offer. I could easily have written more about the narrator himself, obsessed with getting into Czentovic's mind; or about McConnor, the aggressive Scots millionaire, a man who can't take no for an answer (and definitely doesn't like losing). In fact, while it may seem that our two protagonists are addicted to chess, they are not the only ones with a bit of a problem...

I read this twice, about ten days apart. Both times I intended to spread my reading out over two nights; both times I rushed through it in a single evening. While I would love to go into a deep, psychological analysis of the book, in truth that really is as much about Schachnovelle as you need to know...

All I Have To Do Is Dream...

2011-11-28T19:30:00.000+11:00

It's time to leave the ruins of post-war Cologne now, and the German Literature Month Tour Bus is making another long journey south, this time returning to Austria over the next couple of days to peruse two classic pieces of short writing. Yes, it would have made for a shorter trip if this stop had been scheduled after our last visit to Vienna - we apologise for the inconvenience...

*****
Back in August, during my own month of German-language reading, I read a couple of novellas by Arthur Schnitzler (Leutnant Gustl & Fräulein Else), psychological tales providing insights into the minds of the protagonists and the wider Austrian society alike. I had been intending to return to Schnitzler at some point, and the current event seemed like a fitting opportunity to read one of his most famous works, Traumnovelle (Dream Novella) - perhaps best known in English for providing the basis of Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut...

The story takes place over two days in late-nineteenth-century Vienna, where we meet Fridolin, a successful doctor, and his younger wife Albertine. The couple appear at first glance to be a happily-married couple with a beautiful young daughter, but appearances, as we know, can be deceiving. Beneath the urbane, civilised surface, both Fridolin and Albertine harbour repressed sexual desires, urges which they will attempt to satisfy in very different ways.

While the younger Albertine, sexually naive at the time of her marriage, is starting to lose herself in dreams and fantasies of other lovers, her husband is tempted to do much more. In a night of unusual occurrences, the opportunity arrives to betray his wife and give in to his desire to experiment sexually. However, the following day, everything is seen in a very different light...

The premise sounds risqué and highly sexually charged, and this is the impression I had before reading Traumnovelle; the truth, however, is that events are (for the most part), a lot less explicit than I had expected. In reality, it is the possibility, the promise, of sexual activity which is tantalisingly portrayed; Schnitzler is actually far more concerned with what's going on inside the heads of our (relatively reserved) friends than in any bedroom antics they may get up to.

Fridolin, despite all his bluster and macho bravado, actually comes across as a little boy on an awfully big adventure. We are told most of the story through his eyes, and (naturally) the women he meets all appear to see something special in him, whether it's the daughter of his recently deceased patient, the lady of the night he encounters or the mysterious stranger at a very exclusive party (the kind where clothing is - at least late in the evening - strictly optional...). However, in the cold, rather wintry, light of day, his allure is not quite as obvious.

In fact, the reader is led to believe that he has no intention of philandering and is merely jealous of his wife's nocturnal fantasies. The couple agree at the start of the novella to be honest with each other (to a fault!), so why is Fridolin so upset with Albertine for revealing her little sexual dreams? Well, I'm afraid I'm not qualified to go deeper into that area (especially while we're in Vienna!), so I'll just leave the couple where the book finishes, a little closer than they were before, but perhaps also a little farther apart.

If you want tense, ambiguous writing, with excellent descriptions of the shadowy side of Viennese culture, this is definitely one to try. It's a book to devour in a single sitting; just don't expect to come away with all the answers that quickly. I'm hoping to return to Traumnovelle for another try soon as, like Schnitzler's other stories, it may need a second reading for the writer's intentions to fully sink in...

German Literature Month - 'Der Engel Schwieg' Read-Along

2011-11-26T20:00:00.016+11:00

It's funny how things work out.

I realise you're probably not quite with me yet, so let me explain. Among my many plans for German Literature Month, several of which have fallen by the wayside, was an intention to spread my reading as widely as possible, and one reason for this was to avoid reading more than one book by any given author. However, after enjoying Heinrich Böll's early novel Und sagte kein einziges Wort, I caved in (as I am wont to do) and bought a copy of his posthumously released work Der Engel schwieg (The Silent Angel) just in time for Caroline's read-along.

Don't worry - I am (albeit slowly) going somewhere with this...

*****
Der Engel schwieg is a novel Böll drafted at the request of his publishers; however, they (in their infinite wisdom) decided that the tone was not what they, or their readers required at the time. It was not until 1992 that the book was published for the first time, in honour of what would have been Böll's 75th birthday.

The reason for the rejection was quite simply that the Germans were apparently sick of stories about the war, an idea which seems a little absurd now, but was probably fairly accurate at the time. Böll's book then, dealing as it does with the experiences of a soldier gone AWOL right at the end of the Second World War, may have seemed a little unpalatable - which, of course, is not to say that it isn't a good book...

The main character of the novel is the aforementioned soldier, Hans Schnitzler, who returns to Cologne in search of three things: a new, safe identity; the wife of a man whose message he has promised to deliver; and, most importantly, a reason to actually carry on living. After disposing of the first two of his tasks, Hans decides on a whim to return an overcoat he borrows from a Catholic hospital he visits, and (in a rather sentimental twist) goes some way towards succeeding in his third task.

The war may be over, but the hard work of actually living is only just beginning. In the first third of the novel, the reader is repeatedly assaulted by the uncaring remarks of Böll's weary inventions. The overall impression of the survivors of the war is that the dead are the lucky ones, as they will not have to deal with the pain and hardships to come. As the story progresses though, and Hans and Regina (the owner of the overcoat!) become closer, the tone grows more optimistic, suggesting that there is always a way forward, even if it is currently hidden from sight.

This idea is one of Böll's central themes, and Der Engel schwieg is, as much as it is a novel, a repository for the ideas the writer was to develop over the rest of his career. One of Böll's most successful, and certainly most substantial, works, Gruppenbild mit Dame (Group Portrait with Lady), is a more detailed, extended look at the time and issues covered here. However (and this is where I have been going since the start of the post!), the work most influenced by Der Engel schwieg is, of course, none other than Und sagte kein einziges Wort...

On the very first page, as Hans is first startled, and then fascinated, by a dusty, grimy statue of an angel, I had an uncanny feeling of déjà vu (or perhaps déjà lu!), one which was quickly born out. You see, once his novel had been rejected, the prosaic writer, with a family to provide for, cannibalised his story, sending parts off for publication in newspapers and recycling some of it in the later novel. The angel scene is not the only one reused in Und sagte kein einziges Wort: both Hans and Fred have an impeccable memory for faces, while Regina's battle with dirt is very similar to Käte's experiences in her one-room apartment. In addition, the sympathetic priest who helps Hans out has a more-than-passing resemblance to the clergyman Käte and Fred encounter.

But there is more of a similarity than just a few recycled passages. In essence, the later book is a redrafting of Der Engel schwieg, with the action moved several years into the future. Rather than concentrating on the difficulty of moving on at the end of the war, Und sagte kein einziges Wort focuses on the day-to-day struggles of the poor in a time when the Wirtschaftswunder had yet to take hold. Obviously, the idea of a struggling working class couple was more acceptable than that of a couple living in sin in a bomb-damaged house...

Useful as it is to the Böll scholar though, Der Engel schwieg is a fascinating novel in its own right. The descriptions of the constant search for food, a pleasure which has become a need, a drive, can be painful to read, reminding us of our fortune in being able to open the cupboards any time we feel peckish. We are stunned by Hans' walks through the streets of Cologne, over piles of rubble, past houses with no roof (and walls with no house). And, as is usually the case in Böll's fiction, there is a villain - a rich man, well-connected and influential in the church. Part of Böll's magic here is in showing us how he too is actually a very unhappy person...

According to Caroline, Böll is considered to be a bit of a sentimental and romantic read by the Germans, perhaps not as heavyweight as certain other novellists, and I can definitely see where you could get that idea. However, in his efforts to humanise the anonymous lives of ordinary Germans after the war, he also succeeds in creating real, flesh-and-blood heroes. From depressing, hopeless beginnings, his creations do eventually see light at the end of the tunnel. Hans and Regina, initially envious of the dead, later find happiness, a feeling they didn't think would ever return:

"Ich bin sehr glücklich", sagte sie langsam.
"Ich auch", sagte er, "ich weiß nicht, ob ich jemals so glücklich war."

"I'm very happy", she said slowly.
"Me too", he said, "I don't know if I was ever this happy." p.155 (2009, dtv)

Sometimes, it's nice to just have a happy ending...

A Natural Disaster and An Immaculate Conception

2011-11-24T20:00:00.004+11:00

First impressions are very important, but they can sometimes be deceiving, especially when it comes to books. For example, my first exposure to Thomas Hardy (admittedly in my teens) was a bit of a disaster, but he's now one of my favourite writers. With this in mind, and with my ever-so-slightly negative review of Michael Kohlhaas still ringing in my ears, I thought it only fair to give Heinrich von Kleist a second chance. And a third :)

*****
Michael Kohlhaas was one of three stories in the first volume of Kleist's Erzählungen (Stories), and I decided to give the other two a try, starting with the shortest of the three, Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile). In this brief tale, a young man, Jeronimo Rugera, is in prison, waiting to be executed for having seduced the beautiful Donna Josephe (in a Catholic country in 1647, this was quite a big deal...). Along comes a major earthquake, and Jeronimo is sprung from both his chains and his prison cell while most of Santiago is left in ruins. Meanwhile, Josephe is being led to her execution - will she also be saved? And what will happen to the two lovers if they survive?

Das Erdbeben in Chili is a bitter-sweet tale, telling of divine intervention and human retribution, and I think I must have actually read it before as the plot was very familiar. The story is divided into three distinct parts: the escape from the destruction of the earthquake; a brief, temporary reprieve in a valley reminiscent of the Garden of Eden; and a final act in a church which has somehow been saved from God's wrath.

Jeronimo and Josephe appear to have been saved to live another day, but, as is often the case in literary fiction, a happy ending is a boring one, and the reader is never confident that all will be well. Just what kind of depressing ending awaits... well, I'll leave that to the reader to find out ;)

*****
Das Erbeben in Chili is an entertaining tale, but a good short story is not nearly enough to change my opinion of Kleist by itself, so we'll let today's second offering decide. The last of the three Erzählungen, Die Marquise von O... (The Marquise of O...) is one of Kleist's better-known stories; certainly, it was the one I'd heard most about before reading this collection.

The story starts with an announcement to the effect that the Marquise of O... has sent out a message in a newspaper, asking for the father of her unborn child to reveal himself to her (now that's one hell of an opening sentence!). We then go back to the start of the story, where the widowed Marquise is caught in a battle for her father's castle and attacked by a lecherous gang of invaders. Luckily, an honourable officer comes to her aid, and she is saved from the attentions of the soldiers. A while later, she discovers she is pregnant (without having slept with anyone!), and in the midst of all this confusion, the Duke, her noble rescuer, arrives, pleading for her hand in marriage...

Die Marquise von O... is an excellent story, and one which is far better written and executed than Michael Kohlhaas. The idea is intriguing, and the opening sucks the reader right into what is ostensibly a mystery, but is actually an examination of family values and attitudes towards infidelity and illegitimacy. The trials the poor Marquise has with her parents remind me of Effi Briest's family issues (but in reverse...), and Kleist manfully spins the story out, keeping the reader in suspense for as long as possible.

However (and we're going a little way into territory not to be trodden by those who wish to approach the story with an unbiased eye), I felt that Kleist missed a trick with the rather obvious ending. The one he eventually goes for is probably the one you were expecting all along, and I felt, after having been witness to some rather disturbing family scenes, that there was another, slightly less obvious, but infinitely more disturbing, candidate for the paternity of the Marquise's unborn child...

*****
So, is that enough to redeem Kleist in my eyes? Well, let's call it a draw: one success, one failure, and one entertaining, but brief, little tale. Of course, Kleist did write a second volume of Erzählungen - I suppose a final decision can wait until I get around to reading some of those :)

Taking The Law Into Your Own Hands

2011-11-21T20:00:00.005+11:00

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the death of Heinrich von Kleist, one of the most famous writers in the German language, and this week Caroline and Lizzy have invited us to pay tribute by reading one of Kleist's works. I must confess that I probably already have a couple of unread Kleist works somewhere at home in England, as I'm sure they were set texts, either for my A-Levels or the first year of university. Ones which I conveniently ignored...

This means that the time for giving Kleist a go is long overdue, and today's post will deal with a novella which many of you will have heard of, Michael Kohlhaas. This interesting little tale is set in sixteenth-century Germany, where the eponymous hero is a horse trader in the east of the country. On crossing the border from Brandenburg to Saxony one day in the course of his work, a cunning nobleman demands papers (which he has no right to demand). Kohlhaas is forced to leave two horses behind as surety for his promise to obtain the papers, and when he returns, having been assured that there is no need to obtain any papers, he finds his groom banished from the castle and his horses run-down and skeletal.

Kohlhaas' legal efforts to obtain justice for this treatment are thwarted by nepotism - the nobleman is very well connected -, and his wife's attempts to take the case to a higher source of power comes to a tragic conclusion. So, the horse trader does what any justice-minded citizen would do in his case: he liquidates his assets, hires some mercenaries and lays waste to the surrounding countryside...

Which is where the reader sits up and says, "Erm, sorry, did I miss something there?". No, you heard right the first time. While Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor, Kohlhaas burned everyone's houses down because they wouldn't tell him where his enemy was hiding. I must admit, it wasn't a plot turn I had been expecting, but the arson and ambushing is fun while it lasts.

That's not all though. While in Wittenberg, after having been severely rebuked by a certain cleric in a public message, our Michael decides to pay a personal visit to the peeved churchman to straighten out their differences. Fairly run-of-the-mill, no? Well, yes, were it not for the fact that not many people drop in unannounced on Martin Luther...

You could be forgiven for wondering how this all holds together, and I would have to say that as entertaining as it is, I don't really think it does. There were large parts of Michael Kohlhaas where I really wasn't sure if I was enjoying myself, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, I wasn't a big fan of the writing. There was an abundance of names and titles, all flung at the reader without pause, making it difficult to hold information in the mind long enough for it to make sense. I also found the text to be slightly over-punctuated, with an abundance of commas which detracted from my ability to read smoothly (yes, pots and kettles do come to mind somewhat here!).

However, it is the plotting, rather than the language, which is the biggest hurdle with this book. Kleist wrote his Erzählungen quickly, primarily for financial gain, and at times it feels like it. The novella just seems to be a collection of ideas flung together in the hope that they will stick and form a coherent story. The late twist in the plot, a rather Gothic turn of events, seems contrived, and I do wonder if the idea was actually present at the commencement of writing...

There is, of course, more to the story than this. There are philosophical elements present, especially concerning the right of the individual to take justice into their own hands when the state has failed them. Also, the late plot twist, while difficult to swallow, does have the effect of maintaining the reader's attention until the final pages (which, let's face it, can only be a good thing).

All in all though (and I apologise in advance to all those who love Kleist), this wasn't one of my more successful forays into G-Lit, and it made me feel that perhaps my late-teens self had the right idea after all. Michael Kohlhaas is entertaining, but I've read a lot of better books, even over the past few weeks. Perhaps my next attempt will bring a more pleasing result...

German Literature Month - 'Effi Briest' Read-Along (Part Three)

2011-11-19T18:00:00.175+11:00

I've finally made it to the end of Effi Briest, and an entertaining journey it's been too. However, dear reader, if you have yet to reach the end of the novel, it would be a good idea to leave my blog post-haste, lest your eyes be offended by news of events yet to come. Go on then...

*****
For those of you who have also reached the end of the book then (and for those who don't intend to), this third post will look back at the final section and try to summarise some of my overall thoughts on Fontane's novel - and a very good one it turned out to be too. As suspected, things all went a little pear-shaped for our heroine on her return to Berlin, and I turned out to be (sadly) right in my suspicions that Effi's innocent comments on outliving certain characters were fated to be proven untrue.

Of course, Fontane's light touch in describing, or rather not describing, Effi's indiscretions was a major turning point, and when we find out (via the letters) the full extent of Effi's betrayal, we feel a little betrayed ourselves. For the first, and perhaps the only, time in the book, the reader distances themself from Effi, sympathising with Innstetten in his turmoil. With later events in mind, it is ironic that it is actually Annie who is the means to Effi's downfall...

Of course, our sympathy with the politician is fleeting. In a matter of pages, he has made his decision, one which will end in a violent death, a further lingering one and (probably) an extremely disturbed childhood. The moment Innstetten chooses to pursue Crampas, ignoring the inner voice which implores him to forgive and forget, he returns to his usual robotic self, unaffected even by a brief stretch in prison. Effi herself describes her husband best when, near the end of the novel, she says to herself:

"Denn er hatte viel Gutes in seiner Natur und war so edel, wie jemand sein kann, der ohne rechte Liebe ist." p.249 (Hamburger Lesehefte)

Effi's casual comment about the goodness of Innstetten's nature, coupled with a complete absence of love, is a telling one indeed.

We never really expected much from Effi's husband, so his actions on learning the truth of the affair, while extreme, are not exactly surprising. However, the reaction of her parents was absolutely stunning, probably one of the most jaw-dropping moments of the book. I had assumed that Effi would be returning to Hohen-Cremmen to live out her life in tranquil solitude, so her mother's letter was rather... surprising, shall we say.

Over the first two weeks of this read-along, our hosts, Caroline and Lizzy, had been dropping hints as to the importance of the parents in Effi Briest, and it is only in the third section that we see why. It would be interesting to find out how Fontane's contemporary readership saw this part of the plot. Were the late-nineteenth-Century German folk as upset as we were at the way Effi was disowned, or did they also think that it was the only possible action? Did they believe that Effi's parents redeemed themselves by finally taking her in three years later after her serious illness? Because I certainly don't...

I'm fairly sure though that Fontane fully intended the parents to be despised by his readers. The contrast in the final scene between the faithful Rollo and the disinterested Briests is a sight to behold, and the final words of the book, between the mother and father, really say it all:

"...ob sie nicht doch vielleicht zu jung war?"
"Ach, Luise, lass... das ist ein zu weites Feld." p.250

When the mother tentatively asks if perhaps Effi really had been too young to marry Innstetten, the father replies with his usual stock, dismissive response (which I like to interpret as 'opening up a can of worms'!). Concerned parents? I'll leave that for you to decide.

*****
So, stepping back from the action for a moment, how good is Effi Briest as a book, and how does it compare to those other great novels of marital infidelity, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary? Well, as a character, Effi is infinitely more sympathetic than the two other fictional ladies mentioned, and credit for that goes to the writer and his decision to start his story at the very beginning. I am not a big fan of heroines betraying their husbands, whatever the cause, but by introducing Effi to the reader at a relatively young age, Fontane allows us to live through her marriage with her, seeing it through her eyes, noticing the neglect of her ambitious husband. It also helps that she realises that her actions are wrong and attempts to make amends, a very different turn of events to those portrayed in Tolstoy's and Flaubert's novels.

However, that's not to say that it's a better book. Despite my antipathy for AK herself, I think Anna Karenina is a wonderful book (even if it's more the Levin side which interests me), and I think it shows a deeper character development than Fontane's novel. Fontane is probably one of the best classic German authors I've read when it comes to character development, but compared to some Victorian writers (and the two Russian legends), he still comes off second best.

One of my problems with Effi Briest is the character of Innstetten. I don't feel that he was brought to life in the way you'd expect from a major character, especially compared to Effi herself, and this detracts a little from the novel as a whole. Still, this is comparing the book to classics of world literature, and I'm not dismissing it by any means. On the contrary - it's a wonderful book, and one I'll no doubt be rereading many times over the coming years. And Fontane's emphasis on Effi is not a bad thing; he is able to transfer the affection he feels for his heroine across to the reader, helping us to form an attachment with the doomed young women.

Finally, should anyone doubt Fontane's affection for Effi, one line towards the end of the novel (p.247 in my version) finally shows us what his true feelings are:

"Arme Effi, du hattest zu lange hinaufgesehen und darüber nachgedacht..."

When you're on such familiar terms with your characters, it's safe to say that they have a special place in your heart...

Das Schloß - The Play (The Director's Cut)

2011-11-18T20:00:00.124+11:00

As you may have noticed from my posts this week (and from my earlier reviews of Der Prozeß/The Trial and Die Verwandlung/The Metamorphosis), there's something about Kafka's work which makes writing a parody seem easier than actually reviewing the book. His works are so obviously allegorical and divorced from reality that I find it hard to summarise the main ideas and interpret what I'm reading. Nevertheless, I suppose I should explain myself a little, if I am to redeem myself after my little escapades...

*****
Das Schloß (The Castle), like Kafka's other novels, was a work which his executor, Max Brod, was supposed to destroy after the Czech writer's death. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how much you like it) Brod ignored the instructions and decided to publish it anyway. Like Der Prozeß, it's a surreal tale, following a normal man as he attempts to make sense of an increasingly abnormal situation, although this time there is no actual resolution to the story.

The book begins on a snowy night as the Land-Surveyor K. enters a village and asks to stay at an inn. He has come at the behest of someone at the 'castle', a shadowy, mysterious entity which few people have actually visited. Not long after his arrival, K. is met by two assistants, Artur and Jeremias, who have been sent to him by the castle, and he also receives a message from an official. From here though, his attempts to actually get into the castle go nowhere...

It's clear from the outset that the castle is a metaphor for something deep and meaningful. It's equally clear that anyone who claims to know what it actually is has their pants on fire. The whole point of Kafka's work is that it defies unravelling; there are several possible keys to the text, each as likely and as implausible as the next. The best thing to do is just to give it a go and make up your own mind about what is actually going on...

Would I recommend Das Schloß? Yes and no. It's definitely not for anyone who has yet to pick up anything by Kafka. The chapters can sometimes seem like an interminable monologue disguised as one side of a conversation, followed by... well, another interminable monologue disguised as one side of a conversation - Kafka characters do like a good chat. At times, you can read page after page, or even chapter after chapter, without really thinking you're getting anywhere. Also, the more desperate K. gets to actually enter the castle, the more unbelievable it all becomes - abandon a sense of proportion, all ye who enter herein!

However, if you're looking for challenging, thought-provoking writing (and are prepared to abandon the concept of any real plot), Das Schloß is well worth reading. It's easy to see why it's one of those must-read books; it's also easy to see that it's not one I'll be rereading on a regular basis though ;)

*****

Before I wrap-up my work on Kafka's epic though, I thought I'd just help out a little with my posts this week. I'm sure that most of you Germanophiles will have picked up on all the subtle allusions, but here's a quick key for those who missed some of the feeble jokes:

Act One:

- The Gary mentioned in the play is, of course, Gary of The Parrish Lantern fame, who invented the idea of the German Literature Month Tour Bus during my solo G-Lit month back in August (so basically, you have him to blame for all this!).

- The phone number for the Castle hotline (371883) is actually Kafka's date of birth.

- The recorded message (and the Innkeeper's later refusal to give K. Tony's room) refer to one of Kafka's most famous short stories Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law) - well worth reading :)

- The last line of Act One, paraphrasing a quotation from The Wizard of Oz, namechecks Gottfried Keller's novella collection Die Leute von Seldwyla (The People of Seldwyla).

Act Two:

- Hohen-Cremmen is, of course, the home of Effi Briest's parents (Effi is also alluded to at the end of Act Three...).

- Barnabas, like the other characters mentioned (e.g. Frieda, the Innkeeper) is actually from Kafka's book.

- Buddenbrooks, a semi-autobiographical tale of the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck, is one of Thomas Mann's most popular works.

Act Three:

- Caroline and Lizzy, the shady people sharing a crafty dram with Gary, are, of course, the hosts of the whole German Literature Month (so you can blame them for all this too!).

- The phrase "add that to the file" refers to the masses of paperwork in the nightmare bureaucracy of the castle, where everything has to be written down.

*****

And that, thankfully, is that! I hope you enjoyed the show, and don't forget to check out the real thing one day - if you can find your way to the castle, that is...

Das Schloß - The Play (Act Three of Three)

2011-11-17T20:00:00.033+11:00

A few hours have passed. The short winter day is drawing to a close, and the sky is getting darker by the minute. The Innkeeper is behind the bar, drying glasses and studiously not looking in Tony’s direction. A barmaid is also behind the bar, using a rather dirty-looking cloth to wipe down the long, wooden surface. Tony is still sitting at the table nursing his beer, staring at the glass, concentrating on the dark remnants inside. Suddenly, he looks up and, gesturing in the direction of the bar, tries to catch the barmaid’s eye…

Tony: Hello? Could I get another please?

[The barmaid looks up, nods, and starts to fill another tankard with beer. A few moments later, she walks over to the table and puts the tankard firmly down. After picking up the finished drink, she goes to walk away.]

Sorry, could I ask you something, erm…?

Barmaid: Frieda, my name’s Frieda.

Tony: Frieda… could I ask you something about the castle, Frieda?

[Frieda sits down opposite Tony, her manner noticeably less hostile than before. Tony pauses, smiles, and then continues speaking.]

I was wondering if you had… if you had ever been up there…

Frieda: [Surprised] To the Castle? What, of course not! [Giggles] Why would I have been to the Castle? [She leans forward, and her face becomes more serious.] I do know a man though, an official called Kramm… have you heard of him?

Tony: No…

Frieda: Well, he’s supposed to be very influential, knows a lot of people… [She pauses, looking Tony up and down.] Of course, he’s a lot older than you… [She smiles coquettishly across the table.]

Tony: [Nervously playing with his wedding ring] Actually, I think I should call my wife…

[The smile disappears from Frieda’s face. She stands up and storms off in the direction of the kitchen. A door is heard to slam in the distance. From behind the bar, there’s a mutter from the Innkeeper. The only audible words are “add” and “file”. Tony starts to get up, as if to walk over to the telephone again, when a noise from behind stops him. He turns around. The door opens, and the darkness of late evening is framed within its outline . A man’s figure emerges from the darkness and enters the inn.]

Man: [Looks around] Hello? Could someone help me please?

[Frieda looks around, and her eyes light up when she sees the handsome face and strong build of the newcomer. She rushes from behind the bar and addresses the stranger.]

Frieda: Welcome to the inn! Are you looking for a place to stay? Dinner? Drinks? Or… [She plays with her hair and sends an unambiguous look towards the man.]

Man: [Taking a step backwards] Erm, well, actually… I’m here on business as a Land-Surveyor, at the Castle, I believe, and I was looking for a place to stay tonight. Do you have any rooms?

[The Innkeeper, who has been drying the glasses up to this point, looks up and speaks.]

Innkeeper: Sorry, no rooms.

[Tony looks up in surprise.]

Tony: But you offered me a room? I won’t be needing it, so why don’t you let Mr…

Man: K.

Tony: [Sceptically to the man] K.? [The man nods.] Really? [The man nods again. Tony turns back to the Innkeeper.] Why don’t you let Mr. K. have my room?

Innkeeper: No, can’t do that. That room’s just for you. And I’m adding that to your file…

Tony: [Jumping up and shouting] Will you stop saying that?!!

Frieda: [To K.] You can share my room…

[The Innkeeper’s face darkens, and he begins to walk around from behind the bar. Frieda takes a step towards K., and K. takes two big strides back. Tony takes K.’s arm, and guides him towards the door.]

Tony: Come on, let’s go. You can’t even get into the castle anyway, so we may as well get out of this village while we can. [Points at the coach] We’ve still got a seat on the bus if you want to join us…

K.: Have you got toilets on board?

Tony: Toilets, coffee-making facilities, wide-screen television, extensive library, very comfy seats…

K.: Sounds good. [K. and Tony walk across the road to the coach. Gary, Lizzy and Caroline, loitering on the pavement across the road, slip guiltily back onto the bus, Gary slipping what looks suspiciously like an empty whisky bottle into his coat pocket. He says something to the driver, and the engine roars into life.] So, where are we going anyway? Anywhere special?

Tony: Not really. I’ve got a friend up north, and I thought I’d pay her a visit.

K.: [Hopefully] A friend… Pretty, is she?

Tony: [Thumping K. on the shoulder] Yes… and she’s married. Anyway, Effi’s not like that…

[The two men get onto the coach. There’s a loud cheer, and, moments later, the bus drives off down the road. Very soon, it has disappeared into the darkness and the falling snow.

Back in the inn, Frieda is sitting in the middle of the floor, howling and tearing her hair out. The Innkeeper is standing behind the bar again, polishing some glasses. Suddenly, the phone rings. The Innkeeper puts down a glass, walks over to the phone and picks up the receiver.]

Innkeeper: Hello? [Undecipherable sounds from the other end of the line] That’s right, two visitors, not one. And a bus. [More sounds] Understood. Can you add that to the file?

Das Schloß - The Play (Act Two of Three)

2011-11-16T20:00:00.004+11:00

A few minutes have passed. Tony is now seated at one of the round tables in front of the bar, along with the Innkeeper. The Innkeeper’s Wife brings over a tray with two beers on it and puts them down in front of the two men. Tony’s beer is brought down with a crash, sending a small puddle of beer flying towards his fur coat. The Innkeeper’s Wife sneers at Tony, then turns on her heel and stomps back to the bar. Tony begins to speak…

Tony: So what you’re saying is that I’m actually inside Kafka’s book?

Innkeeper: [Drinks, then brings his tankard crashing down onto the table] No! Why do you keep talking about a book? You are in the Village, the Village which belongs to the Castle, and there is no way to get into the Castle without connections, without working your way into a higher position. If you start off as a barman, perhaps, if you are dutiful, in a few years, there will be the possibility of moving on to something more substantial…

Tony: [Interrupting] And then I can go to the castle?

Innkeeper: [Sighs] No. Then you may have access to someone who might know someone who occasionally has access to a person who works in a capacity loosely connected with the Castle… [Pauses] …if you’re lucky.

Tony: Hmm. [Pauses, then speaks] I was planning to be in Hohen-Cremmen on Saturday...

[There is silence. Both men devote themselves to their tankards, Tony thinking of how to turn the conversation, the Innkeeper wondering how he can end it. Suddenly, the door crashes open, and, framed against the streetlights and the swirling snow, a young man appears, still in the doorframe for a brief moment, before moving into the inn.]

Innkeeper: [Standing up] There you are, my friend, the answer to your prayers! [Points to the newcomer] This is Barnabas, and he is a messenger from the Castle! [Addresses Barnabas] Do you have a message for our foreign friend?

Barnabas: [Shifts nervously from foot to foot] I do have a message to deliver… [He steps forward and hands Tony a small piece of paper. Tony opens it and reads it aloud as the Innkeeper tries to peer over his shoulder.]

Tony: [Reads the note] “ Tony, the people on the bus are getting a bit restless – some of them aren’t too keen on Kafka anyway and want to move on to the Thomas Mann trail. How are those tickets looking? Gary.” [Tony and the Innkeeper look at Barnabas, who is trying to look innocent and failing dismally.]

Barnabas: [Sheepishly] I never said it was a message from the Castle now, did I?

[Tony scribbles something on the back of the note and then hands it back to Barnabas.]

Tony: Here you are, take this back to the bus for me, will you?

[Barnabas nods, pockets the message, and leaves the inn.]

Innkeeper: [Curious] What did you say?

Tony: [Sitting down at the table again] Oh, I just told Gary to stick the German TV adaptation of Buddenbrooks on the DVD player – should keep the Mann fans quiet for a good few hours.

[The Innkeeper sits back down, and Tony leans across the table to ask him a question.]

So, tell me, what do you think of the castle?

Innkeeper: [Nervously] The Castle? What I think of it? Me? What do you mean? The Castle is just the Castle, everpresent, everchanging, untouchable… [He leans back, gazing at the wall behind Tony’s head, lost in thought.] …the Castle is a part of the Village, and we, in turn are a part of the Castle…

Tony: Well, yes, but what I’m trying to get at here is the idea behind the castle, what it represents, the metaphor behind the reality if you will. [The Innkeeper nods cautiously.] I mean, look, there are a lot of possibilities, the bureaucracy, that’s one, the castle could be representative of our inability to penetrate the thick red tape surrounding us and preventing us from enjoying our daily lives. Or, or… [Waves his arms in the air as if clutching for words] …it could all be a religious metaphor, the castle as heaven and all the people down below in the village looking for the best way to get to the castle, confused as to the best way in, distracted by all the earthly, that is to say, village diversions… [The Innkeeper nods again.] …it has to be that, right? What do you think?

[The Innkeeper leans forward slowly, and Tony leans towards him, eager to hear his thoughts.]

Innkeeper: [Slowly] Do you know what I think the Castle is? [Tony waits expectantly.] A big stone building – with bloody thick walls. [Tony’s head thuds into the table, splashing into a puddle of beer. The Innkeeper pats him on the shoulder and stands up to go.] I’ll add that to your file…

Das Schloß - The Play (Act One of Three)

2011-11-15T20:00:00.004+11:00

A large coach pulls up in a quiet street in a small village somewhere in Central Europe. Through the gently falling snow, the words “German Literature Month Tour Bus” can be seen on the side facing us. A door opens, a man steps out, struggling to get into a large fur coat, and walks towards the only building in the street with lights on, “The Bridge Inn”. He crosses the street and opens the door…

Tony: [Turns to face the bus and shouts] Tell the driver to keep the engine running Gary, I’ll just ask someone for directions. [He walks into the inn and sees the Innkeeper] Ah, good morning!

[The Innkeeper looks at him blankly] Good afternoon?

Innkeeper: Hurry in, hurry in. We have been expecting you, your room is ready, please, take a seat, warm yourself by the fire, you must be tired after your long journey, and cold, very cold, after all, it is winter, and the winters here in the village are extremely bitter, something a stranger like yourself will have to get used to if you are to adapt quickly to our small community.

Tony: [Confused] Erm, well, I actually just wanted to ask for directions to the castle, you know, the one that’s used in Kafka’s book – a few of us are on a bit of a literary tour. Do you know it?

[The Innkeeper’s wife, sitting behind the bar, breaks out in laughter. The Inkeeper grins wryly and, turning to his wife, raises an eyebrow.]

Innkeeper: Do we know the castle? Hah! [Turns back to Tony] Of course we know the Castle, everyone knows the Castle, the Castle is why we are here, the Castle is, if this is not too much of an exaggeration, the only reason for our, for my, for your existence. [He looks expectantly at Tony]

Tony: [Nervously] OK, so… could you give me some directions up there? You see, we’re a bit lost…

[The Innkeeper visibly flinches, and his wife stops laughing, gets up and runs out of a door at the back of the inn.]

Innkeeper: You want to go to the Castle? You think you can just decide to go to the Castle? You honestly believe, you naïve young man, that you can just make your own way up to the Castle, ignoring the secretaries and assistants and just wander in, unannounced, simply stroll into the Castle? Do you? Do you really?

Tony: [A little cowed] Well, no.

[The Inkeeper is relieved]

We’re planning to buy entrance tickets, of course…

[The Innkeeper slaps his hands over his face, and presently a sound of sobbing can be heard. After standing around awkwardly for a minute or two, Tony starts to look around the inn, and, almost immediately, a telephone catches his eye. He wanders over, having forgotten the innkeeper – who is now banging his head, slowly, but firmly, against the wall -, and reads a sticker attached to the wall above the phone. It reads: “Castle Hotline – 371883. Twenty-four hour connection to your lords and masters all year round (except Christmas Day and Shrove Tuesday)”. Tony picks up the receiver and dials the number.]

Automated Menu: [A woman’s voice speaks] Thank you for calling the Castle Hotline. This call will be recorded for quality assurance and legal purposes. If you are not happy with this, well, tough luck. So that we can best answer your call, please choose from one of the following options. If you are looking for a job as a messenger, press 1; if you have a complaint about one of our friendly officials, press 2; if you would like to know our opening hours, press 3; for directions to the Castle, press 4…

[Tony presses 4]

There are many roads to the castle. These roads are ever-changing and sometimes impassable, and each is accessible only to the person it was created for… [Tony sighs] …to return to the main menu, press the ‘star’ key… [Tony presses the ‘star’ key, immediately followed by 3.]

Our opening hours are infrequent, inconstant, whimsical and unknowable for the common man. Thank you for calling the Castle Hotline – a transcript of this call has been added to your file.

[There is a click, and the line goes dead. Tony bangs the receiver against the phone (once, hard) and then replaces it.]

Tony: [To himself] Toto, I've a feeling we’re not in Seldwyla any more…

German Literature Month - 'Effi Briest' Read-Along (Part Two)

2011-11-12T18:00:00.100+11:00

And we're back for the second of three posts on Theodor Fontane's classic, Effi Briest. While the first post was relatively general in nature, this one will start to give the game away plotwise, so if you haven't made it to the end of Chapter 24 yet, please look away now...

*****

Still with me? Excellent :)

The middle section of Effi Briest picks up where Chapter Fifteen left off, with the dashing Major Crampas worming his way into Effi's affections both in front of and behind Innstetten's back. On a series of rides and picnics by the coast, the two become closer, and the more Effi realises that her honour is in danger, the more she tries to pull away. Our poor heroine tries to face down her admirer, but events (as they always seem to do in fiction - bad writers!) conspire against her, and on a cold night, alone with the Major in a sleigh, the inevitable happens...

The reader, to this point at least, is not aware of any further indiscretions, although this is implicitly hinted in Effi's 'walks', but I believe Fontane is sympathetic to Effi's struggles. The references she makes to the poem Gottesmauer indicate her willingness to seek shelter from the storm of Crampas' advances - ironically, when the wall of darkness does surround her, Crampas is on the wrong (or right side)...

However, the move to Berlin comes as a godsend to our young heroine, and she deliberately avoids returning to the coast, putting herself out of temptation's way until Innstetten can join her in the capital. It looks as if a dangerous chapter in her life may be behind her, with Crampas far away and her husband now near enough to pay her (and her daughter) more attention. With a little effort - on the part of both husband and wife -, there's no reason why things can't end happily ever after.

Of course, that would make for a very boring ending, and there are indications that the final sixty pages or so will bring another dramatic turn. The mere mention of the name Crampas (this time the village Effi hears of on her holidays), brings memories of her betrayal rushing back, and as we leave her on a sleepless night at her parents' house, we sense that somehow or other, the marriage is fated to come crashing down around Effi's ears...

Should we feel sorry for her? Well, I've already indicated that perhaps there is reason to forgive her, both on the grounds of her youth and the amends she has tried to make in avoiding Crampas before the move to Berlin. However, it's not quite as simple as that. The full extent of the relationship with Crampas has yet to be revealed, and for us to forgive her, Effi would need to be truly penitent. Yet the final part of Chapter Twenty Four shows Effi's thoughts to be less related to guilt and more concerned with getting away with it all.

So where do we go from here? Will Innstetten stumble upon the truth? Will Crampas brag and let the cat out of the bag? Will Effi succumb to guilt and blurt everything out to her husband? How will her parents react? And, assuming the secret is aired, what will Innstetten do about it? I still have the feeling that Effi's youth and naivety may lead her to do something drastic...

...but I suppose I'll find out what really happens next week ;)

Please don't miss the Swiss!

2011-11-10T16:00:00.003+11:00

Climb on board! After a few days in Austria and Germany, it's time for the German Literature Month Tour Bus to trundle over the mountains again for a brief trip around Switzerland. The Swiss can be the overlooked cousins of the G-Lit family - certainly, my reading experiences reflect that -, so I thought it was time to see what they have to offer. Today's treats? A couple of tasty nineteenth-century novellas for you all to get your teeth into - onward, driver!

*****
The first of today's two stories is Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's Der Schuß von der Kanzel (The Shot from the Pulpit), an entertaining and amusing novella set in a small Swiss town. Pfannenstiel, a young man with clerical ambitions, pays a visit to General Wertmüller, a returning local hero with dubious morals and a mischievous sense of adventure. Pfannenstiel is hoping for a preferment overseas, mainly to escape from an unsuccessful romance, but the General, always with an eye for the comical and ludicrous, has other plans for our young friend...

This is a short tale, eleven chapters spanning about thirty-five pages, but it's highly entertaining. In some ways, it feels more like a play, with clearly defined changes of scenery, an impressive (and humorous) turning point and a neat resolution pleasing all and sundry. The characters are surprisingly well drawn for such a short text: the devilish General; his cousin, the shooting parson; Pfannenstiel, the pessimistic young lover, and his intended, the feisty Rahel. There's more than a touch of Trollope about proceedings - and I mean that in the best possible way ;)

The first half of the novella is suggestive of Gothic literature, with the tense nocturnal discussions between Pfannenstiel and the General, and the spooky lodgings the young cleric is led to for the night, but once the sun has risen (as should be the case), things look very different, and the wry humour takes over. I don't want to say anything more about the plot, but the title is there for a reason - and a very good one it is too! Meyer shoots and definitely hits the mark :)

*****
Today's second offering, Die schwarze Spinne by Jeremias Gotthelf, reverses the progression of Meyer's novella in some ways. It starts peacefully enough, following a group of farming folk in a small Swiss village as they get ready for a Christening. Once the child has been baptised (not without one minor hiccough), the guests head back to the farmhouse for plenty of food and lashings of drink.

In between courses, some of the men decide to stretch their legs, and when they sit down under a tree to rest, the grandfather of the house begins to tell the guests a story - one which will remain in the memory far longer than the food... You see, the misleading first ten pages or so form the first part of a frame narrative, and the grandfather's story, suggested by the Christening and the mention of an old piece of wood used in the new house, is the real start of the story (and an amazing one it is).

A few hundred years earlier, a group of farmers are set an impossible task by the knight who owns the village. Desperate, and at their wits' ends, they are offered help by a mysterious stranger, but at a certain price - the gift of an unbaptised child... From here, events turn eerier and darker, and when the villagers attempt to cheat the stranger, it soon becomes clear that this was someone they should not have messed with. Winds howl, storms thunder over the valley, and the pregnant women start to get extremely nervous. And when you have trouble with the devil, who are you going to call? A clue - it's not the Ghostbusters...

Die schwarze Spinne is a stunning piece of short fiction, evolving from a commonplace piece of naturalist writing into a full-blown horror story, pitting good against evil and scattering the countryside with the corpses of the unjust and unfortunate alike. The religious implications are fairly clear, but the story works on many other levels too. The idea of collective guilt and the inability to speak up against the crowd, even when you know that what is being done is wrong, is an important one, as is the role of the outsider in bringing disaster to an otherwise harmonious community. There may also be overtones of the 'Black Death' plagues which afflicted Europe in the dark ages, represented by the black curse which sweeps over the valley.

If you want good writing with a high body count, look no further. The further the story progresses, the higher the death toll, and it is genuinely gripping reading. Then the story returns to the present day, and the guests (in a slightly more sombre mood) return to the table; just when we could be forgiven for thinking that the worst is over, the grandfather takes the story up again, leading the reader through another round of death and chaos...

And the spider? Well, I'd got about half-way through the story when I began to wonder where this black spider (Black Widow?) had got to - and then it began to appear (and I chose those words deliberately)... I'll say no more (you'll enjoy the book more that way!), but remember this: if you start looking under your bed for spiders after reading Die schwarze Spinne, don't say I didn't warn you...

A Couple Of (Metaphorical) Big Guns

2011-11-07T18:00:00.144+11:00

The German language has produced thirteen Nobel prizes in literature so far, behind only English and French, and today's post celebrates two of those Teutonic laureates, in what could be described as skillful planning on my part, but which would be more accurately described as blind luck and quick thinking - enjoy ;)

*****
First up today is one of my favourite German authors, Heinrich Böll. He received his prize in 1972, but today's offering, Und sagte kein einziges Wort (And Didn't Say A Word), is one of his earlier offerings. Set in Cologne in 1950, the book relates two days in the lives of Fred and Käte, a married couple whose recent life together has actually been spent apart. Unable to cope with living in a cramped single room with three noisy children, Fred has moved out, sending Käte his pay packet each month and occasionally meeting up with her for clandestine dates. However, Käte has had enough of this demeaning existence, and the events of the weekend force the couple to face up to both their responsibilities and reality.

Post-war blues among the poor is Böll's speciality, and once again he portrays the plight of people going nowhere with a clear, sympathetic and, at times, ironic pen. He also continues in his attacks on the Catholic church, an organisation which he sees as putting the horse before the cart in its insistence on adherence to doctrine above brotherly love. By comparing the pomp and ceremony of the church with a procession of pharmacists in town for a convention (the neon signs imploring us to trust in our pharmacist are a particularly deft touch!), Böll pokes fun at an organisation that is perhaps taking itself a bit too seriously.

The book is divided into thirteen chapters written in the first person, alternating between Fred and Käte. The couple tell us in their own voices about the struggles they face, and it is perhaps more what they tell us about the other than about themselves that gives the reader an insight into their exhausting existence. With their contrasting ways of coping with the daily grind (Fred lives recklessly, unable to see the point of living; Käte takes each day as a battle, facing up to her enemies, whether they be landladies or dirt...), the question has to be asked: are they actually right for each other?

You'll have to read the book to find out...

*****
Gerhart Hauptmann was honoured sixty years before Böll, but ninety-nine years later I still hadn't got around to reading any of his works (now that's laziness for you!). That has now changed, mainly thanks to the miracle of free e-texts, as I was able to download a well-known novella - plus an unexpected bonus...

Bahnwärter Thiel is a short novella featuring the aforementioned railway attendant, a gentle giant of a man who loses his first wife while gaining a son. Unable to continue his work and take care of his child, he marries again, this time for practical purposes rather than love. As it soon becomes clear that his new wife is less than fond of his son, Thiel is forced to choose between domestic harmony and standing up for his child. The wrong decision could prove deadly for all involved...

The story, written in the late 1880s, is a beautiful piece of naturalism, its lengthy, elegant descriptions of the woods around Thiel's work hut reminiscent of one of my favourite writers, Thomas Hardy. The tragic outcome of the tale only strengthens that connection, and in fact Hauptmann was greatly influenced by Hardy's writing. Thiel could be a Hardy hero, tormented by someone whose presence should make his life more bearable, doomed to an unhappy life despite his able faculties and propensity for hard work.

However, one could argue that it is all his own fault. The crushing blow he receives is directly related to his failure to face up to his moral dilemma. In shying away from his duties, he fails himself and his son... A sad story, but beautiful writing.

*****
The Kindle file showed that Bahnwärter Thiel was 818 sections long, but it actually finished a while before that, leaving a further story to fill the remaining space. Der Apostel is a short story about a man who walks through the Swiss countryside believing he is an apostle, or even the son of God himself. Our hero considers himself to be chosen to spread the word of peace, abstaining from conflict and from eating the flesh of animals. He attracts amazed stares wherever he goes, crowds of children following him through the streets as he walks ever onward...

...at least that's what he tells us. You see, I'm not entirely convinced that Hauptmann intends the apostle's ramblings to be taken completely at face value. We never see what is actually happening around our egotistical friend, and I'm tempted to believe that the writer may just be poking fun at his creation. Of course, I may be very, very wrong (one of the two!). Whatever the truth is, Der Apostel is an unexpected tale in more ways than one :)

German Literature Month - 'Effi Briest' Read-Along (Part One)

2011-11-05T16:00:00.003+11:00

A while back I got a message from Lizzy Siddal, one of the hosts of German Literature Month, asking if I'd read Effi Briest, as she had 'secret plans'. Of course, that has turned out to be a read-along of what is arguably the most well-known and popular German classic. I'd previously read two of Thedor Fontane's works, Unwiederbringlich (Irretrievable) and Frau Jenny Treibel (Really? You really want a translation?) - and loved them -, so I was looking forward to cracking open my Hamburger Lesehefte edition and joining in the fun. The only problem is going to be rationing the reading out over the allotted time...

*****
The novel starts with a detailed description of the Briest house (read mansion) and an even more thorough portrait of the heroine herself. Effi is a seventeen-year-old, mischievous, playful girl, an attractive young woman who teases one of her friends about her fervent desire for marriage. It comes then as a surprise to the modern reader to see her engaged in a matter of pages to Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old baron whom Effi first meets at the same time we do - a few hours before the betrothal...

Of course, back in the nineteenth century, this kind of age gap was fairly common (it was the successful career men who could afford to support a family that had the pick of the beautiful young women), and the aristocracy have always been known for putting social mobility over love in arranging suitable (and often quick) marriages. Even so, the fact that Innstetten is himself the former lover of Effi's mother does it make it that touch more intriguing!

On marrying the Baron, Effi is taken out of her comfort zone, both literally and metaphorically, as she is forced to leave her idyllic family home to move to the Baltic Coast, far from friends and family, surrounded only by cold, disinterested landed gentry. Once the honeymoon is over, she begins to discover that her husband, while kind and gentlemanly, is slightly self-centred and has little time for the romantic side of marriage, leaving her to her own devices far too often. For a high-spirited woman like Effi, this probably does not bode well for a long and happy married life.

This alone would probably give our young heroine pause for thought, but she has one more slight problem to contend with. You see, the house she and her husband share is an old, ramshackle building, much of which is unused. One night, when Innstetten is away, Effi is startled by what she thinks is a figure gliding through her bedroom - and the day after, she hears stories about the death of a Chinaman who used to live in the town...

*****
You don't need to be psychic to realise that things are unlikely to end well in Effi Briest. The young couple are patently unsuited to each other, Effi's need for adventure clashing with Innstetten's attention to what other people think, and the slightest catalyst (perhaps in the form of the dashing Major Crampas?) could bring things crashing down around their ears.

But what kind of novel will Effi Briest turn out to be? After fifteen chapters, I'm still not 100% certain. Is it a Jane Eyre, with a former wife hidden in the attic? Is it a new The Mysteries of Udolpho, with villains around every corner? Or is it another Anna Karenina, where Effi will eventually succumb to the temptation of marital infidelity? While I have my suspicions, it really could go any way...

One thing I did pick up on though was Effi's repeated comments about her youth and about other people (e.g. Innstetten, Niemeyer the priest) dying before her. That looks suspiciously like tempting fate to me... Am I right? Well, I'm sure things will be a bit clearer by this time next week - happy reading :)

A Rather Masculine Set of Shorts

2011-11-04T00:00:00.004+11:00

A while back, I sent a polite e-mail asking if I could get a review copy of Iosi Havilio's Open Door from And Other Stories, a small independent publisher over in the UK. I got back a polite reply with a request that I accept an e-copy, one I was happy to agree to. I was even happier when I was sent not only Open Door, but also All the Lights, a collection of short stories by a young German writer called Clemens Meyer - just in time for German Literature Month :)

*****
All the Lights, translated by Katy Derbyshire, contains fifteen stories, mostly set in the poorer Eastern states of Germany. The protagonists are mainly men whose lives have not quite turned out as they would have expected. Whether they are in jail, or have spent time there in the past, on the dole, working in a supermarket or living alone in an old damp flat, the protagonists of the tales (it would be a stretch to call them heroes...) have a lot to regret, and (usually) a lot of time in which to do it.

A common theme is life passing us by, or having already passed us by. In Waiting for South America, Frank is distracted from his empty life by a series of letters from a friend who claims to have struck it lucky and gone off to chase his dreams in the Americas. Frank's drab existence is contrasted with the glamour described in the letters he receives - although we have our doubts as to the veracity of these claims.

Fatty Loves is an excellent story, showing us an overweight, middle-aged teacher, sitting in his living room reminiscing about his earlier career, and about one student in particular. When his thoughts start to become a little disturbing though, the reader is forced to analyse their feelings for the teacher and perhaps pass judgement on his behaviour...

The original title for this collection was Die Nacht, die Lichter (The Night, the Lights), and as childish and rhyming as that would have sounded in English, it's a very apt title. Many of the events take place between dusk and dawn, emphasising the solitude of the characters by following them through empty streetscapes.

In Your Hair is Beautiful, a man lurks outside a woman's house in the dark, caught in an obsession which has cost him his family and his job; Carriage 29 sees a wine salesman sitting on a train at night, with no knowledge of how he got there; in I'm Still Here!, a black Dutch journeyman boxer experiences the darker side of East Germany, both inside a bar and out on the streets, after surprisingly knocking out his local opponent for an unexpected and rare win. These are not streets you would like to be caught in...

The majority of the stories are intriguing, but I do have some reservations about All the Lights. While there are some notable exceptions (the confusing opener Little Death and the frankly bizarre The Short Happy Life of Johannes Vettermann spring to mind), the stories did tend to blur into one another for me, and I had trouble remembering much about some of them the day after reading them. Also, I'm a sucker for measured, flowing (florid?) prose, and Meyer's terse, sparse style didn't really do a lot for me.

Perhaps my biggest problem though was a feeling that several of the stories were one-trick ponies (the biggest, funnily enough, being Of Dogs and Horses). There are twists, perfectly good ones, but... I'm not convinced that many of the stories would bear up to repeated reading, and that's what I'm looking for in the books I choose.

In fairness, All the Lights was slightly handicapped from the start. I'm not a big fan of e-reading, and I felt a bit funny reading a German book in English (probably for the first time!). I was also reading it having just completed Alois Hotschnig's Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht; I'm afraid that I found the Austrian writer's collection a much better one, and perhaps this affected my appreciation of Meyer's work.

Still, it's a pleasant collection of stories, and there are many that are well worth reading. In the Aisles, another late-night special, set this time in a supermarket, is a well-written, poignant tale of male friendship, while the last story of the book, The Old Man Buries his Beasts, follows an old man as he takes a last look around his farm and the moribund nearby town. These two tales are good examples of how some stories can stand up to rereading, even when the outcome is fresh in the mind. Even if the same cannot be claimed for all the stories, All the Lights is still worth checking out.

Eerie, Austria

2011-11-02T18:00:00.149+11:00

Welcome to German Literature Month, thirty days showcasing the best fiction, modern and classic, written in the German language :) It's very important to note that the month is about celebrating the language, not the country - throughout the month, I'll be trying my best to mix it up when it comes to geography, chronology and genre.

To start off then, it's only fitting that I branch out a little from my usual classic German novels and novellas and introduce a collection of short stories from a contemporary Austrian writer (one which many of you may have heard of...). Alois Hotschnig's slender collection of stories, Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht, also known by the English title of its Peirene Press translation, Maybe This Time, comprises nine tales, all of which are normal enough on the surface, but which eventually become... well, ever so slightly creepy.

The first story, Dieselbe Stille, dasselbe Geschrei, is a good example of what the collection is about. A man who has recently arrived in his area tells us about his neighbours, a couple who spend all day lounging around on a deck by the river at the back of their house. This seemingly innocuous behaviour gradually makes the man feel strangely oppressed, and his waking (and sleeping) moments begin to be filled with his obsession over the neighbours' lack of activity. Very quickly though, despite the sympathetic first-person narrative, the reader starts to mistrust our guide - especially when he starts using binoculars to spy on the couple...

Hotschnig elegantly plays with the idea of a man unable to move on with his life, caught up obsessing on something he doesn't understand, and it's a theme which crops up several times in the collection. In Vielleicht diesmal, vielleicht jetzt (the story which gives the English translation its name), it's a whole family which is unable to live their lives, waiting as they are for the mysterious, ever-elusive - and ever-absent - Uncle Walter to join them at a family gathering. In Morgens, mittags, abends (probably my favourite of the nine stories), a whole area seems to be caught in a loop, people watching people, crossing roads, walking down the street and coming back again, all fixed in time by an event we are unaware of until the last paragraph. One aspect of this story I loved was a girl playing the flute, practicing the same few bars over and over again, breaking off at the same point each time - very much like a stuck record.

Another idea the writer explores is the idea of watching, and the majority of the stories (if not all of them) contain the verb beobachten, to watch or observe. In Zwei Arten zu gehen, a woman walks down the street, shadowed by a man who could be either a stalker or a former lover (we're never completely sure which...); Eine Tür geht dann auf und fällt zu, one of the creepiest of the tales, has its hero in a sort of trancelike state, observing himself at various times in the past, while being watched by a rather strange old lady (with a penchant for dolls...); In meinem Zimmer brennt Licht, a story about a man with a hidden past, is full of people observing each other, looking for hints of what might be hidden behind silence.

Most of these observers appear to be watching other people, not because the observees are doing anything wrong, but because the observers are living their lives through other people, needing other people's approval. This idea is taken to extremes in Du kennst sie nicht, es sind Fremde, a story in which a man's identity constantly changes - an issue nobody has a problem with except the man himself. One way of interpreting this story is that we are what other people see us as and that our identity is externally created (although this little tale takes the idea further than one would expect!).

The ideas in the stories are excellent, and they are all wonderfully constructed. I went through the collection for a second time a week after the first reading, and if anything, I enjoyed it more the second time around (a sure sign of a good piece of writing).

However, the success of the book is not limited to the ideas as the writing style is also key to the way the stories unfold. The majority are told in the first person, unravelling in a near-constant interior monologue mostly uninterrupted by any dialogue (what little conversation there is is reported), and the sense of things being slightly off-kilter is heightened by the frequent use of contradiction within sentences, the narrator backtracking on an idea within seconds. If the storyteller isn't completely sure of what they are saying, then how on earth can we trust them...

There are a lot more things I'd love to say about Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht, and considering that the book comes in at a mere 120 pages, that probably gives you as much of an idea of how highly I rate this slender tome as a few more paragraphs would ;) It has been described as Kafkaesque, and I can only agree with that assessment. While there's little here that could be described as extraordinary or supernatural, you can't help but get the feeling that it's all just a little bit... wrong. But, in another sense, it's very right :)

October 2011 Wrap-Up

2011-11-01T00:00:00.008+11:00

October was a mixed bag compared to previous months. I had a few review books to get through, a couple of slim Japanese works waiting to be read, and (of course) I wanted to get a start on reading for November's German Literature Month. In addition to this, I had one review to write for both the Literary Giveaway Blog Hop and the Classics Circuit's Gothic Literature Stop. Enough excitement for one month, you'd think, but wait - there's more...

You see, October marked a significant milestone in the history of Tony's Reading List. For the first time in its three-year existence, I have managed to crack the magic century - 100 books (not out)! E.T.A. Hoffmann's gothic thriller Die Elixiere des Teufels had the honour of being the 100th book, for those who want to know :)

Anyway, on with the show...

*****
Total Books Read: 10
Year-to-date: 106

New: 10
Rereads: 0

From the Shelves: 7

From the Library: 1

On the Kindle: 2

Novels: 5

Novellas: 3
Short Stories: 2

Non-English Language: 8 (6 German, 2 Japanese)

In Original Language: 5 (5 German)

Books read in October were:
1) Jenseitsnovelle by Matthias Politycki
2) Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata
3) That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott
4) Die Elixiere des Teufels by E.T.A. Hoffmann
5) All That I Am by Anna Funder
6) A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe
7) Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht by Alois Hotschnig
8) All the Lights (Die Nacht, die Lichter) by Clemens Meyer
9) Und sagte kein einziges Wort by Heinrich Böll
10) Bahnwärter Thiel & Der Apostel by Gerhart Hauptmann

Murakami Challenge: 0 (3/3)

Aussie Author Challenge: 2 (19/12)

Victorian Literature Challenge: 1 (28/15)
Japanese Literature Challenge 5: 2 (6/1)

Tony's Recommendations for October are: Alois Hotschnig's Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht and Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter

October was a good reading month with plenty of interesting books consumed. I loved my first taste of E.T.A. Hoffmann's work, Herr Böll once again produced a wonderful slice of post-war life, and Matthias Politycki's tale from beyond the grave was also a highlight. However, Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht and A Personal Matter were the two that jumped out at me when I was thinking about this month's recommendation, and (once again!) I was unable to split my top two :)

So, onto November, and the next thirty days will be dominated by my Teutonic tastes. For the second time this year, I will be participating in a month of German-language reading - this time accompanied by other people! Hopefully, you'll all stick around to find out about the joys of Central-European literature - bis bald ;)

A Fictional Slant On Fact

2011-10-28T16:00:00.000+11:00

Stasiland, Anna Funder's non-fiction treatment of the horrors of the East-German police state is a wonderful book, one that I've read several times. In the many years since it was released, I've occasionally wondered where her next effort was (and what was taking so long...), so I was very happy when I learned that Funder had finally written a new book (and even more so when the kind people at Penguin Australia sent me a copy!).

Unlike Stasiland though, All That I Am is a novel, Funder's first public foray into fiction. It relates the efforts German dissidents made between Hitler's rise to German Chancellor and the start of the Second World War to let people know what exactly was happening in Germany. While the world preferred to allow the great dictator to slowly build up his forces, hoping that he would be satisfied with throwing his weight about in Eastern Europe, people like Ruth Wesemann, Dora Fabian and the playwright Ernst Toller, exiles in London, attempted to reveal the atrocities the Nazis were committing back in their home country.

While the emigrés' main problems are initially to do with earning money and finding a way to get their message across, their situation eventually becomes more perilous. Even in peacetime London, the Nazis have people looking out for Germans who don't follow the party line. As opponents of Hitler's regime begin to disappear all over Europe, the small pocket of exiles in London begin to look nervously over their shoulders...

The story is told in flashbacks by two of the major characters: Ernst Toller, a poet and playwright, is sitting in a hotel room in New York in 1939, dictating changes in his autobiography to an assistant; Ruth Becker, living in the Sydney of around a decade ago, begins to recall those turbulent years in London when she receives Toller's manuscript in the post. In alternating chapters, flicking back and forth in time, Ruth and Toller explain how Hitler came to power, what happened when he did and the price people paid for opposing him.

While the story is told by Toller and Ruth though, it is the woman who connects them, Dora (Ruth's cousin and Toller's lover), who is arguably the central character of the novel. She is one of the leading lights of the intellectual resistance, running risks both inside and outside Germany in an attempt to open people's eyes to the dangers ahead. Gradually, she becomes aware of what she and her friends are up against, a total disregard for human life and the idea of democracy, shown in her treatment after being arrested in Berlin, where she realises that the law can no longer protect her:

"Dora was suddenly afraid, in her filth under the too-bright light, that it didn't matter what she said. The point had been passed where the law could protect her. This argument was a farce, the cat playing with the mouse for the pleasure of smelling its fear." p.142 (Penguin Hamish Hamilton, 2011)

All That I Am is certainly an entertaining book, and it deals with a fascinating period of history, one I love reading about, so I was a little disconcerted when I realised half-way through the book that I wasn't really enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I eventually realised that one of the reasons for this was that I was subconsciously comparing it to another of my recent reads, Elliot Perlman's The Street Sweeper. Next to this weighty tome, another book partly set in wartime Europe, Funder's book seemed a little lightweight, fluffy even. While I still prefer The Street Sweeper, I think the second half of All That I Am made up for (and perhaps justified) the calmer pace of the middle section of the novel. The lack of urgency here made the events depicted later on even more striking, setting the reader up for an emotional fall.

The other issue I had with All That I Am though is one which I've already seen covered in a couple of reviews, one which is inevitable considering the author's background. The majority of the characters are real, as is much of the action, so considering that Funder has already written a non-fiction book, it's very difficult for the reader (for this reader, at least) not to wonder if this may have been better off left as fact, rather than fiction. Perhaps the less immediate nature of the material led to the decision to fictionalise events (Stasiland was fairly recent history, with plenty of people to interview) - it would be interesting to see (in a parallel universe...) how a non-fiction version would have turned out.

Still, don't misconstrue the musings of this blogger as advice not to read the book. It's more an unfair comparison with Perlman's wonderful novel and Funder's own fantastic non-fiction work. All That I Am is an interesting read, set in a fascinating period, and anyone interested in this slice of history would be well advised to give it a go. Funder succeeds in showing us why events in the 1930s turned out as they did, and Ruth's words describe as well as any why people in Germany at the time failed to stop the agony of the Reich's innocent victims.

"Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so...

... But Toller, great as he was, is not right. It is not that people lack an imagination. It is that they stop themselves using it. Because once you have imagined such suffering, how can you still do nothing?" p.358