Jan - March 2019: The Mediterranean World

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Jan - March 2019: The Mediterranean World

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1thorold
jan 5, 2019, 4:41 am



Welcome to the Q1 2019 theme read! This time we're looking at writers and writing from the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea and linked by that body of water.

Historically, the Mediterranean counts as the cradle of Western civilisation; it's been the interface between Islam and Christian Europe since the early middle ages; in the nineteenth century it was often a frontier between "metropolitan" and "colonial" worlds; it's still a major trade route, a beautiful place where rich people like to go on holiday and a barrier refugees struggle to cross. Plenty of reasons to look at it.

2thorold
Bewerkt: jan 5, 2019, 5:11 am

Mediterranean countries:

In the Mediterranean:
- Malta
- Cyprus (& Northern Cyprus, not internationally recognised)
- and many other islands belonging to countries listed below

On the African side:
- Morocco (with two Spanish exclaves: Melilla and Ceuta)
- Algeria
- Tunisia
- Libya
- Egypt

On the Asian side:
- Israel / Palestine (complicated...)
- Lebanon
- Syria
- Turkey

On the European side:
- Turkey
- Greece
- Albania
- Montenegro
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Croatia
- Slovenia
- Italy
- Monaco
- France
- Spain
- Gibraltar (UK)

As defined in the original proposal, this theme could cover anything by writers from these countries, or anything about those countries. But it seems sensible, especially when dealing with major countries like France, Spain, Italy and Turkey, to restrict ourselves to works that are particularly relevant to those countries in their role as Mediterranean countries. For instance, French books about Corsica or Marseille or by French North African writers, Italian authors on Sicily and Sardinia (did you know there was a Sardinian Nobel prize winner...?), Spanish books about the Balearic Islands, etc.

3thorold
Bewerkt: jan 5, 2019, 10:32 am

Some random reading ideas

Historical background
- Lots of possibilities. John Julius Norwich's The Middle Sea is a nice accessible single-volume guide to Mediterranean history from geological times to the late 20th century, for instance.

The ancient world
- In RG we normally tend to focus on quite recent writers, but cultural history plays such a big role in the Mediterranean that there's probably a lot to be said for going back a little way. Especially when one of the founding texts of Western literature, the Odyssey, is just about the most comprehensively Mediterranean work ever!
- Mary Beard's SPQR has a lot about how the Roman Empire developed out of Mediterranean trade

Religion and War
- From St Paul to the battle of Lepanto and through to WWII, people have been carrying physical and ideological weapons across the sea. There should be plenty of material to build a reading theme on there...

Travel
- The 14th century Ibn Battuta, from Tangier, is one of the most entertaining travel writers I've come across, and he visited just about everywhere in the Islamic part of the Mediterranean
- North European writers regularly go into ecstasies when they get to the shores of the Mediterranean, and often have trouble remembering to go home again afterwards. Goethe is only the most famous of many.

Entrepôts and Melting Pots
The Mediterranean coast has some famously multi-culti cities along it: Marseille, Alexandria and Barcelona are perhaps the most obvious to have a look at
- what about Jean-Claude Izzo's gloriously dark Marseille Trilogy of crime novels?
- or the poetry of the Alexandrian Greek writer Cavafy?
- Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium isn't quite on the Mediterranean, but it's had a vital role in determining what happens in the region for so long that it probably can't be excluded from the thread.

Empires that come and go
The Mediterranean does empires like nowhere else. Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Venetian, Napoleonic - you name it, they've had it. And they come and go and leave a mess behind as they do so.
- No-one captures the declining days of the Ottoman empire quite as effectively as Nikos Kazantzakis...
- ...unless it's Ivo Andrić or Ismail Kadare
- Albert Camus didn't think he was writing about colonialism in L'étranger, but when we look at his view of Algeria through the perspective of Kamel Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête, it looks quite different.

Trying to get on the boat
- The only Mediterranean refugee-novel that comes to my mind at the moment is the wonderful Transit by Anna Seghers, about Europeans trying to escape the Nazis via Marseille. But there must be others about the current refugee crisis, surely?

Island-hopping
- Grazia Deledda, from Sardinia, was the second woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, in 1926. Her novels might be a bit lush and romantic for modern tastes, but they have a lot to tell us about the complicated influences shaping Sardinian culture around the end of the 19th century
- Sappho of Lesbos only left us a handful of poetic fragments, but they had quite an influence...
- Nikos Kazantzakis is probably the most famous Cretan since the days of Ariadne
- Following leads to books about Cyprus always seems to bring you to Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons. In theory, we're allowed to read this, as Durrell was one of those people who fell through a hole in immigration law and never got a British passport, but it would be a bit of a cheat. There must be some good books about the troubles of Cyprus by actual Cypriot writers...
- Sicilian Andrea Camillieri was nearly seventy when he published his first story about Inspector Montalbano - 25 years later he still seems to be going strong (cf. "Mediterranean diet")
- Sicily was also the home of the more literary but rather less commercially successful Tomaso di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard
- Corsica doesn't seem to have such a big literary footprint, apart from the immortal Astérix en Corse, but it was the home of the academician Angelo Rinaldi, whose novels give us some insights into the LGBT community of Bastia.
- Georges Bernanos famously wrote about the human rights abuses of the Spanish civil war in Palma de Mallorca in Les grands cimetières sous la lune
- Malta seems to be hiding its light under a bushel - I can find plenty of books about the Knights of Malta and the WWII siege, but not much sign of books by Maltese writers. Anybody?

...

4thorold
Bewerkt: feb 5, 2019, 12:24 pm

Intro part 4: Suggestions from the group

Collecting ideas from the posts below (not including books actually reviewed here)

Awards
- The Prix Méditerranée and Prix Méditerranée étranger (for novels, short stories or non-fiction about the Mediterranean, written in French and translated into French, respectively) CK page: https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Méditerranée - see >12 Dilara86:

Greece
- Kazantzakis - also The Odyssey a modern sequel, Freedom or death - see >14 rocketjk: >19 librorumamans:

Lebanon
- Etel Adnan--Sitt Marie Rose and Elias Khoury--Gate of the Sun--both of those books are awesome. - see >97 lriley:

Graphic novels
- Alpha: Abidjan to Paris by Bessora - see >15 jveezer: >16 Dilara86:
- Riad Sattouf's L'Arabe du futur - see >18 LolaWalser:

5LolaWalser
jan 6, 2019, 7:21 pm

Nice setup, Mark, thanks.

The usual problem of translations (their non-existence, that is) unfortunately spoils most suggestions coming to my mind, especially for readers in English.

Having said that, I am starting with Michel Butor's La Génie du lieu, translated as The spirit of Mediterranean places by Lydia Davis.

6thorold
jan 7, 2019, 2:58 am

>5 LolaWalser: Yes, lack of translations was something I kept coming across during my rapid trawl for interesting ideas. But I’m sure we’ll come up with a few possibilities between us.

The most obviously Mediterranean candidate I’ve got on the TBR at the moment is La civilisation ma mère (Mother comes of age) by the great Moroccan novelist Driss Chraïbi. I’m also planning to (re-?)read Zorba the Greek.

7SassyLassy
jan 7, 2019, 11:10 am

Looking forward to this theme - thanks to spiphany for suggesting it and thorold for developing it so quickly for Q1.

Great excuse if any is actually needed to read a Kadare I haven't read yet. Wondering about Leonardo Sciascia who is reasonably available in translation, specifically The Wine Dark Sea, which I haven't read.

I think I will start by checking out Empires of the Sea: The Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World and see how that goes. Doesn't Othello start with reference to the battle of Lepanto?

I'm also looking forward to Classics in their own Country.

8LolaWalser
Bewerkt: jan 8, 2019, 11:30 am

I recommend The spirit of Mediterranean places above all for the excellent essay on Egypt. In 1949/50 Butor spent eight months teaching in a town south of Cairo; the essay dates from at least 10-20 years later. Butor was an exponent of the nouveau roman and the "impersonality" and "objectivity" of that tendency favours the essay, although it should not by any means be considered emotionless--in fact, it's Butor's deep identification with something about Egypt that moved him to finally write up his past experience at the moment of political turmoil in the region (and France).

Butor's prose is difficult. It demands concentration from start to finish. Typical non-fiction (and even typical classical fiction) is composed of little bricks composing larger bricks etc. One can take breaks and rest on ledges and terraces, and it's even possible to survey the whole edifice and predict the next structure. There is no such landscape here, this is more like open water. Descriptions of discrete events turn back and subtly expand on what was said before, the text is in a strange recursive movement illuminating itself.

Now I wish I could show what this means by quoting, but Butor's text is like a soap bubble, and the iridescent moveable design on the soap bubble--cutting into it at any point ruins the effect. Nevertheless, let's burst the bubble:

(...) a festival that marked the beginning of spring (one spent all night outdoors, in new clothes, with flowers and onions over all the doors), that is, which corresponded to a complete transformation of daily life for which nothing had prepared me, day and night abruptly changing roles, the afternoon, which soon became torrid, henceforth being devoted to sleep on a mattress which had to be dried in the evening when I woke up because it was soaked through with sweat, life beginning at sunset, the streets, empty until then, suddenly coming alive with a gaiety that hadn't existed during the winter,
   and fragrances taking on an importance, a volume, that they never had in Europe, the smells of flowers and fruits, which made you turn your head in the street as though they were calling out to you, the smells of animals and men, and most of all the smell of corpses which penetrated everything, which was in earth and water, which remained attached to your clothes when you had passed near a cemetery, whether they were recent or thousands of years old, pleasant or disagreeable smells, sometimes so heady that I said to myself that if Saint Augustine had lived in Upper Egypt in the springtime, he wouldn't have been able, when enumerating in the tenth book of the Confessions the temptations he was exposed to, and when describing to us the different sorts of concupiscence, to tell us so simply, and with some surprise and distrust of himself, that "the seductiveness of fragrances leaves him rather indifferent."
   From that time on, the school also had a changed look, the teaching began to disintegrate when confronted with this violent rejuvenation of all things, the students turning up less and less often, the last of the faithful taking out of their pockets, when they arrived, handfuls of little roses they had picked on the way, so that in the end we didn't go to school any more except to verify that the classrooms were empty; (...)


What seems like a description of "external" springtime habits actually reverberates internally with Butor's chagrined and worried remarks on the effects of modernisation and Europeanisation in a poor country etc,--but for that you need the whole bubble.

9thorold
Bewerkt: jan 9, 2019, 6:39 am

Dit-dit-diddely-diddely-dee, Dit-dit-diddely-diddely-dee, ...

Zorba the Greek (1946) by Nikos Kazantzakis (Greece, 1883-1957) audiobook read by George Guidall
(No translator credited, it seems to be using the 1952 translation from French to English by Carl Wildman - apparently there's now a better, more recent one, based on the original Greek, by the American Kazantzakis scholar Peter Bien)

  

Nikos Kazantzakis, who narrowly missed the Nobel Prize on at least nine occasions, counts as the most famous modern Greek writer internationally, although his left-wing politics and his frequent battles with the Orthodox Church made him a controversial figure in Greece itself. Ironically, much of his fame outside Greece is down to two successful films, neither of which bears more than a passing resemblance to the novel it's based on...

Forget Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates in their smart suits - there's no-one even remotely Mexican or British in this novel. Although ... Alan Bates does have more than a whiff of D.H. Lawrence about him, and what with coal-mining, homosocial bonding, fights, sexually-charged scenery, cycle-of-the-seasons, and intellectuals trying to get in touch with their human side, this sometimes does feel like Women in Love with added citrus trees ...

The narrator is a young writer who, still smarting at being accused of being a mere bookworm by his best friend (who has gone off to do humanitarian work in the Caucasus), decides to take a break from intellectual life and have a go at "being a capitalist" in the real world by running a lignite mine he's inherited on the Cretan shore. As sidekick and adviser on practical matters, he recruits a working man he's picked up in a bar in Piraeus, the gloriously muscled and moustached Alexis Zorbas.

The two of them rapidly become close friends as they move into their hut on the beach and connect with the local Cretan villagers. The narrator enjoys Zorba's stories of his long and varied life, in the course of which he has formed his own eccentric moral system, based not on any arbitrary rules or conventions but on his unmediated experience of what gives pain or pleasure to himself and the people around him. And when he runs out of words, he picks up his santuri or starts to dance.

But the narrator is tortured by a growing appreciation of the sterility of his own book-learning. Fortunately, he doesn't just have to sit there and enjoy vicarious experience through Zorba - the two of them get involved with the cycle of village life, with the Cretan scenery, with the mine, with the monks up on top of the mountain, and with relationships with two local women. Or rather non-relationships: the real conversations in this book are always between men, whilst interactions between men and women are only ever about food or sex...

Lots of sunshine, olive and citrus trees, beaches, caiques, moustaches, passion, poverty, tragedy-of-war, evocations of Greek, Cretan, Ottoman and Slav culture and the glorious past, and lots of juxtaposition of complex, transcendental experiences of God with the prosaic, smelly detail of everyday Orthodox religious practice. Whatever else you might say about Kazantzakis - and there are a lot of good things you need to say about him - rather like Lawrence, he is not a writer you will ever catch out understating something. Whenever he gets the adjectives out, you need the subwoofer engaged and the dial turned to eleven.

10Dilara86
jan 10, 2019, 12:19 pm

>9 thorold: I was actually thinking of reading Zorba the Greek, but for some reason, my library doesn't have it. They have the DVD and a CD of the music, though. And two of Kazantzakis's more obscure titles, but not in the public part of the library ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

My first read that's relevant to the theme is Reading English by Rachid El-Daïf. Here's what I tought:

Learning English (Title for both the French and the English version. Because for once, there is an English version... According to the inside front cover, the original Arabic title transliterates as Lîrningh inghlish.) by Rachid El-Daïf, translated by Yves Gonzalez-Quijano





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Lebanese
Original language: Arabic
Translated into: French
Location: Beirut and Zghorta (Lebanon)
First published in 1998


The narrator - Rachid El-D – learns about the assassination of his father in the papers. Ensue reminiscences about his childhood, his parents’ life stories, his father’s doubts about his paternity, his mother’s relationship with another boy/man, and his hometown’s (Zghorta) culture of blood feuds. Despite the humour and self-deprecation, the book didn’t really grab me. I wished I could have skimmed it because it rambled a bit in places, but I couldn’t because I had to pay close attention to make sense of it. Things were somewhat confusing, until the last 40 pages or so, when the different narrative strands came together and started to make sense. I don't regret reading it, but I wasn't moved by it.

11LolaWalser
jan 10, 2019, 12:47 pm

>10 Dilara86:

Hmm, that sounds less good than my experience with another of his books, Qu'elle aille au diable, Meryl Streep!, but I still want to read it. What you say about strands coming together in the end resonates with what happens in Who's afraid of Meryl Streep? too, because of the "unreliable narrator". The tone is jovial but gradually you realise just how sad a story is actually unfolding.

12Dilara86
jan 10, 2019, 12:47 pm

For those of you who can read French (or just to get some contemporary author names), there's the Prix Méditerranée and Prix Méditerranée étranger (for novels, short stories or non-fiction about the Mediterranean, written in French and translated into French, respectively). Last year's winners were Zabor ou les Psaumes by Kamel Daoud and An odyssey: a father, a son and an epic by Daniel Mendelsohn.

13Dilara86
jan 10, 2019, 12:53 pm

>11 LolaWalser: Oh, it wasn't bad - it just didn't resonate with me. There's not one book of his that doesn't look interesting, so I'll definitely read some more, see if I enjoy them more!

14rocketjk
jan 10, 2019, 1:43 pm

>9 thorold: As I also mentioned in your Club Read thread, re: Kazantzakis, it's been many years, now, but I remember very much enjoying and being moved by Freedom or Death, his novel about the fighting in 1889 between the Greeks and Turks of Crete.

15jveezer
jan 10, 2019, 3:43 pm

My favorite "Trying to get on the boat" book lately is the graphic novel Alpha: Abidjan to Paris. Quick read, on point.

16Dilara86
jan 11, 2019, 10:56 am

>15 jveezer: That sounds interesting. I've enjoyed Petroleum, a non-graphic novel by the same author (Bessora). She has a very singular voice. I take it the Mediterranean plays an important role in Alpha ? Do they cross it (I bet in terrible conditions) in their journey from Abidjan to Paris? My library network has two copies (including one that's two months overdue). I might try to get hold of the one.

17jveezer
jan 11, 2019, 10:46 pm

>16 Dilara86: Yes. The Mediterranean is crossed twice (unfortunately). Neither is a great experience. This book opens your eyes to the complexity of the immigration crisis. I was actually lucky enough to snag a copy in the LT Early Reviewers program! It's loaned out now and I'll be passing to as many people as I can so that we can get more to the heart of the issue here as well (I live in Southern Cal along a border of cruelty that the current administration is trying to make even crueler).

18LolaWalser
Bewerkt: jan 12, 2019, 2:38 pm

That sounds very interesting, on the list it goes. I don't particularly seek out "graphic novels" but another excellent title that fits this theme very well would be Riad Sattouf's L'Arabe du futur (The Arab of the Future), currently at four volumes. I'm still waiting for the fourth volume of the original (I've been borrowing them from the library), and the complete run will definitely deserve a special write-up*, but even if you pick up only the first one or two you'll be richly rewarded with an uncommon (to Western readers) insight into life in, chronologically, Libya and Syria in the 1980s.

*(Sattouf is eight years younger than me and moved to Syria a few years after we left, our experience is also otherwise relatively dislocated in various subtle or pronounced ways, so reading his novel gave me a wonderful second experience of a place and time that marked me intimately and yet mysteriously, never-fully-understood-how.)

19librorumamans
jan 12, 2019, 8:45 pm

When it comes to Kazantzakis, I would — time and leisure permitting — choose The Odyssey : a modern sequel over Zorba.

20thorold
Bewerkt: jan 13, 2019, 7:39 am

This was something that caught my eye in passing on Scribd, and looked as though it would fit into this theme read. The English translation comes from the interesting independent publisher And Other Stories, with an introduction by Kadare. I didn't notice until too late that Dones writes in Italian as well as Albanian - if I'd known I'd have looked for this in the Italian original.

About half the action is set in Washington, DC, and the Albanian parts are mostly high up in the mountains, but we do get a few glimpses of the sea and even a bit of bathing, so I'm sure it counts as Mediterranean...

Sworn virgin (2014) by Elvira Dones (Albania, 1960- ), translated by Clarissa Botsford

  

Elvira Dones is a film-maker and TV presenter as well as a novelist. Since leaving Albania in 1988 she's lived in Switzerland and the US.

The Kanun, the code of customary law that has regulated rural life in northern Albania for centuries, includes an unusual provision that makes it possible - in very specific circumstances - for someone born female to adopt male gender by formal declaration. In most cases they do this when a family would otherwise be left without a male head. The declaration includes an oath of perpetual virginity. The people who do this (burrneshas, or sworn virgins) dress and act as men, and are treated in all respects (except sex and marriage) as though they are men.

I didn't know about burrneshas, but I see that it's become a "colourful cultural phenomenon" with a slew of magazine articles and documentary films made about the handful of people who still live this way over the last few years. Looking back, I see there's even a passing mention in John Boswell's encyclopaedic The marriage of likeness, which I read twenty years ago. Dones has also made a documentary film on the subject.

The novel follows the life of Hana/Mark, a young woman who has to give up her studies in Tirana, around the end of the communist era, to look after her uncle and aunt in a remote village in the mountains when they become ill. She adopts male gender when her uncle's death leaves her without a male protector, and lives in this way for some fourteen years - driving a truck, carrying a rifle, drinking raki, etc. - until a cousin persuades her to join the rest of the family in Washington, DC, where she finds herself faced with the tricky process of adapting to life in a new country at the same time as trying to piece together a female identity again.

Perhaps inevitably, this is a book that often feels rather didactic - it's hard to stop ourselves seeing Hana/Mark as an anthropological case-study, even though Dones works hard to make her an individual character. Other characters, such as the beloved-but-old-fashioned uncle, the various not-quite-boyfriends, the motherly cousin and her American-teen daughter, all feel rather sketched-in in consequence. And it was disappointing that the story jumped straight from Hana's decision to become a man to the plane to Washington, without telling us much about the process of adopting another gender and maintaining it. Obviously there are good reasons why Dones might not feel competent to put herself into the character's head once she has taken her decision, but from the reader's point of view that's really the part we're most curious about...

Still, an interesting little book that manages to dig into a relatively obscure corner of Balkan culture without coming across as either patronising or voyeuristic. And probably a writer to follow up further.

21thorold
Bewerkt: jan 14, 2019, 6:11 am

>12 Dilara86: Prix Méditerranée

Thanks for that! - looks like a very interesting list. I've only read two of the writers on the main list and seven of those on the étranger list (only one of the actual prize-winning books, though - Las leyes de la frontera). Correction: two - I'd also read La carta esférica but didn't recognise the French title!

I should think quite a few are available in English - the 2018 étranger winner was even written in English...
I've picked the 2010 étranger winner, Scenes from village life, as my next read.

22SassyLassy
jan 13, 2019, 12:17 pm

>20 thorold: This sent me back to my own thoughts on the book, which leads me to ask, What did you think of the last section?

23librorumamans
Bewerkt: jan 13, 2019, 1:01 pm

>20 thorold:

Also Alice Munro's "The Albanian Virgin" which is collected in Open Secrets and first appeared in The New Yorker in 1994.

24lriley
Bewerkt: jan 13, 2019, 2:25 pm

The mention of Butor (who is an excellent writer and I especially like his Mobile) made me think of the nobel laureate J. M. G. Le Clezio who was born and spent much of his childhood in Nice. His first novel The Interrogation is set on the French Riviera--some others of his too though he's lived and written about many other places as well such as in Africa and Latin America.

Here he writes a bit about his birthplace:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/j-mg-le-clezio-on-his-birthplace-of-nice-france

25thorold
jan 13, 2019, 2:35 pm

>22 SassyLassy: Ah - nice review! I hadn’t seen that before - I apparently only started reading your CR threads with the one after that...

I agree that the ending felt disjointed. It was as though Dones was in even more of a hurry to get it over with than Hana, and therefore issued her with a dream-man who was just a bit too perfect and understanding. But maybe we’re being unfair - as readers, we have a stake in Hana being interesting and different, and we want her to stay that way, but in real life that’s probably the last thing she would want to be.

>23 librorumamans: That’s something else to look forward to - I haven’t read that collection yet. Only started working my way through Munro’s stories quite recently, and don’t want to rush it. I saw that there’s also a historical novel on the same theme by an American writer that was an ER book here: The sworn virgin by Kristopher Dukes.

26LolaWalser
Bewerkt: jan 13, 2019, 4:33 pm

>24 lriley:

Thanks--a welcome reminder I have still lots of unread Le Clézio... His feelings for Nice match uncannily my own for my own Mediterranean hometown--I would bet that "odi et amo" schizoidal disposition toward our roots is awfully common among us born on the coasts of the Middle Sea. Fascism and xenophobia versus fated (because geographical) openness and mixing, forever jockeying for domination, stoking the eternal civil war in our lives.

Speaking of Nice, I read recently a curious pamphlet written by Graham Greene of all people (he was doing a favour to friends) exposing some of its sordid servitude to mafia and the general thuggish mentality: J'accuse, the dark side of Nice.

27thorold
jan 14, 2019, 6:08 am

For some reason I'd never read anything by Amos Oz, the great Israeli writer who died two weeks ago. This book caught my eye as the 2010 winner of the Prix Méditerranée étranger.

Scenes from village life (2009; English 2011) by Amos Oz (Israel, 1939-2018), translated by Nicholas de Lange

  

This is a very delicate little book, in which nothing much seems to be happening - we get seven snippets from the ordinary lives of ordinary people in a village called Tel Ilan, created as a farming community by Jewish pioneers a century ago, and now slowly turning into a "beauty spot". The characters from each story pop up in the background of one or two of the others, but there isn't anything like a connected plot; even within the stories themselves there's no conventional dramatic resolution. And there are borderline strange things going on that are never quite explored or explained. But we learn a good deal from the "throwaway" background details about how small communities work, about families, about the state of Israel and its relationship with its history, about art and work and culture, about life and death and old age, and much else.

Another writer I will have to read more of. And almost a motivation to try to learn Hebrew...

28cindydavid4
jan 14, 2019, 9:06 am

I first read him when I was a teen on a Kibbutz and read quite a few of his book, always loved him, but then I got busy with other things.....His death reminded me that I meant to read more. Think I will start with this new one.

29lriley
Bewerkt: jan 14, 2019, 9:18 am

#26--I think a lot of people have that love/hate thing going for the places they're most familiar with. Le Clezio's been all over though all of his life so he has a broader range than most. His father had family roots in Mauritius and worked for the foreign services. Sometimes the family moved with him and sometimes they stayed behind in Nice but his Onitsha is about a year or so spent in Nigeria just for one time when they did go with him. The prospector is much about Mauritius and one of his best. Africa and Latin America are often locales that come up in his work. He's moved about among peoples and cultures and I kind of look at him as a novelist on the one hand and an anthropologist on the other. My favorite work of his is The Giants though I don't know if very many would agree. Nice or the general area around Nice will show up in The Interrogation, The Flood, Wandering Star and in short story collections Fever, The round and other cold hard facts and Mondo and other stories. He is a great short story writer.

I was thinking Roberto Bolano ended up on the Costa Brava and I know I've read something of his that was set there. Elias Khoury--Lebanese writer--Gate of the Sun is a wonderful book. Assia Djebar from Algeria-Children of the New World and Fantasia: An Algerian cavalcade--both well worth reading.

30thorold
jan 14, 2019, 10:28 am

>29 lriley: Javier Cercas talks about Bolaño in his Catalan days in Soldados de Salamina.

31rocketjk
jan 14, 2019, 12:03 pm

>27 thorold: There was a wonderful radio interview with Oz done on the American radio show Fresh Air. The interview was recorded around the time that Oz's celebrated memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, was published. I want to say 2004. At any rate, it was rebroadcast just after Oz died. Fresh air is normally hosted by a terrific interviewer named Terry Gross, but on this occasion the interview was done by her co-host, Dave Davies. I assume the interview can be heard online, but in any case, here is the transcript. It's quite interesting. Oz was very active in the Israeli peace movement.

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/04/682168487/remembering-israeli-author-and-peace-ac...

32lriley
jan 14, 2019, 12:17 pm

#30--I read that book and a few others by Cercas. He's a good writer.

33thorold
jan 14, 2019, 1:45 pm

>31 rocketjk: Thanks - that was very interesting. He was quite something as an interviewee! I can see I’m going to have to read A tale of love and darkness.

34thorold
jan 14, 2019, 2:03 pm

>32 lriley: El tercer Reich and La pista de hielo are the two Bolaño novels set in Catalonia, if I’ve got it right.

35lriley
jan 14, 2019, 2:40 pm

#34--thank you and I've read both of them. I like Roberto quite a lot.

36LolaWalser
Bewerkt: jan 15, 2019, 1:56 pm

Openly gay Arab/Muslim writers are rare and I feel an obligation to pick up their work when possible, so despite not liking much the first book of his that came my way (L'Armée du salut, Salvation Army), I read Abdellah Taïa's Celui qui est digne d'être aimé (literal translation, "He who is worthy of being loved"). I'm glad to say I found this one a better experience although it confirmed that Taïa's unlikely to become one of my faves.

This one is also a short fragmented autobiographical "novel", told in four "letters" that go back in time (2015, 2010 etc.) The first and the third are by the hero, Ahmed, directed to his (dead) mother and a French lover, respectively. The second is by a French man with whom Ahmed had a single encounter, and the fourth by Ahmed's childhood friend Lahbib, the only other gay boy Ahmed knew back home. On the most universal level, it's a story of disappointment and bitterness that comes with age, as our eyes open to all the ways we have been conned, and by whom (including ourselves...) But more specifically, it's about a poor Moroccan who when young allowed himself "to be colonised" body and soul by the rich Frenchman, and his growing rage, as he finds himself about to be abandoned for a younger lover, at the transaction between his younger self and the older man. As this ageing Ahmed starts to take revenge, by way of making French men fall in love with him only to crush them with rejection, we don't need to bring up the theories of Islamic radicalisation and terrorism to conclude the West creates its own monsters.

Lahbib's letter got to me as no other part of Taïa's writing did (reader, I cried), so I feel right guilty admitting that I fault him, among other things, with banality and shallowness. That said, Taïa's importance to men like himself and other readers living in similar oppressive conditions, not to mention his sheer courage, probably cannot be overstated and trump whatever literary criticisms can be made.

37LolaWalser
jan 15, 2019, 3:44 pm

Max Aub, half German half French, born in Paris, raised in Barcelona, exiled and dead in Mexico, during a term teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1966/67 started writing a book of poems called Lamentos del Sinaí, of which Imposible Sinaí is a small part. Neither collection was published in his lifetime, (he died in 1972); only ten years later.

Aub accepted the invitation to Israel with some idea of finding his roots but was disappointed:

I thought I was Jewish not because of my blood (what does it, poor thing, know of such things?) but because of my ancestors' religion--and I came here with the idea that I might feel something, I don't know what, that would confront me with myself. And nothing happened. I've got nothing to do with these people that I don't have in common with anyone else, just as I've got nothing to do with the Germans and the Poles, the Japanese or the Argentinians. My connections are with the Mexicans, the Spaniards, the French, and also, sometimes, with the English. Perhaps more with the Spaniards, but only those of my generation. No, there is nothing Jewish in me. I'm sorry, but I can't weep, they are foreign to me, as much or more than the Norwegians and the Turks.


Communist, humanist, antifascist combattant and survivor of the Spanish civil war, Aub met the Israeli-Arab conflict, which culminated while he was there in the Six Day War, with scathing condemnation for religious and nationalist justifications, and despairing of any "solution" that would not take in account the bare necessity of actual preservation of life on an actual piece of ground that fed it, on either side. But is there a "solution"? Maybe there is just despair.

Imposible Sinaí is composed of fictional last words of dozens of Arabs and Jews killed during those six days in 1967. Since there doesn't seem to exist an English translation, I'll pick two pieces at random:

AMIN IBN IBRAHIM AL-ATTAR

{biographical note} A representative of limitless fanaticism, fervent believer in his faith and propitiatory victim of his own wild enthusiasm, he doesn't believe in weapons, doesn't believe in the supremacy of one type of plane over another. Only faith in the unique true God can grant triumph. In this ultimate obtuseness (non nationalist), we see the repeated fall of humanity which tolerance had seemed to have brought to maturity. Amin Ibn Ibrahim Al-Attar was born in Cairo in 1948. He died on the second day. He was a celebrated poet in very closed circles and disinclined to reveal his feelings. All the poems of his divan seem to refer to strangers.

The Fool

Let them say what they want: I lived on this land. Let them call it what they want--it had plenty of names--. I don't care. I lived here. I was born here. I knew the woman here. My children were born here. I had a garden here. I had goats. Here was my house. Here was my wife. One day some men came by (I don't care who they were) and told me to leave.
Next I heard from others who talked to me about justice and getting back my garden.
That first thing, I don't know what it is. The second, yes: I remember it very well. And then they tell me I can get it back only risking my life. I wonder:
My life is worth nothing.
Yes, my house.

ANONYMOUS HEBREW

{biographical note} Obviously, because it was written in the classical language, with perfect calligraphy. I know no more; they gave it to me in Genezaret.

--Does anyone know what it means to be Jewish?
Neither you nor me...
It's not like being French, Polish or Russian;
to be Jewish isn't like being stateless.
To be Jewish is something else.
Neither is it like being Christian, atheist,
deist or Muhammedan.
To be Jewish isn't being a sabra
or having an Israeli passport.
--To be Jewish--laughs a Sephardi--is fantastic--
unless you are Orthodox and live in Mea Shearim,
acting like a buffoon.
--To be Jewish is to be a son of Israel
and not believe in it.
--To be Jewish is to be atheist
and worship Jehova.
--To be Jewish is to be a staunch soldier
and a pacifist at the same time.
--To be Jewish is a blessed sacrament.
--To be Jewish is to be white, yellow, and red.
--Nobody knows what is a Jew
and nobody knows in what consists being one.
--And, nevertheless, one is.
--Like you are born black.
--By the ruling of God.
--By the rule of two.
--By the rule of three.
--But nobody knows what it is.

(Because there are of all colours, tall, short, dumb, quick, imbecile, socialist, anarchist, reactionary, communist, rich, poor, ugly, handsome, ordinary, workers, good for nothings, somnolent, alert, valiant, cowardly, repugnant, attractive, left-handed, one-eyed, myopic, well built, blond, dark, redhead, German, French, Greek, Turkish, Spanish. All Jewish.)

But nobody knows in what consists being Jewish nor is circumcision a factory brand.
--We are nobody--says the old woman--next to god.
For others this is certain: nobody is nobody.
Only the Jews know who they are. But nobody knows what is a Jew.


38thorold
Bewerkt: jan 16, 2019, 7:47 am

>36 LolaWalser: >37 LolaWalser: - Looks interesting, especially Max Aub. Noted.
I was thinking of having a look at Michel del Castillo, but haven't got as far as finding any of his books yet...

---

One thing I really wanted to do for this theme was to revisit Cavafy, and he fitted in nicely with this recent novel, which won the 2017 Prix Méditerranée étranger.

What's left of the night (2015; English 2018) by Ersi Sotiropoulos (Greece, 1953- ) translated by Karen Emmerich (USA)

The complete poems of Cavafy (1949, 1976) by C.P. Cavafy (Egypt, Greece, etc., 1863-1933) translated by Rae Dalven (Greece, USA, 1904-1992)

  

Cavafy

Constantine Cavafy (Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης) grew up in Constantinople (Istanbul), Liverpool and Alexandria, the youngest son of a prosperous Constantinople-Greek family. When the family's cotton-export business collapsed at his father's death, he took a job as a clerk in the Irrigation Ministry in Alexandria, where he remained until his retirement in 1922. In his spare time, he built up a considerable reputation as a poet in Greece. This reputation rapidly spread to the English-speaking world as well after he made friends with E.M. Forster, who was in Alexandria working for the Red Cross (and seducing tram-conductors) during the First World War.

Forster famously described Cavafy as "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." About 80% of his poems explore themes taken from his extensive reading in classical and Byzantine (Greek) history and literature; most of the remainder are about his encounters with beautiful young men. In both cases he has a sharp eye for what's really going on behind the history or the transitory desire. It's not hard to see how his subject-matter alone would have captured the imagination of Forster, W.H. Auden, D.H. Lawrence, Lawrence Durrell, and many other British writers of the mid-20th century, even if it hadn't been for his remarkably dry, ironic voice, his precise insight, and the unexpected way his sober rejection of lyrical excesses actually seems to hint at lurid middle-eastern atmosphere much more effectively than if he'd been a steamy French imagist.

There are stacks of different English translations of Cavafy out there - I happen to have grown up with those by Rae Dalven. She was a professor of Greek literature in New York and came from a Greek-diaspora family herself, so presumably had a reasonably clear idea of the right register for Cavafy in English. Her version comes with a nice introductory essay by Auden as well as Dalven's own notes on Cavafy's language and the decisions she had to make in translation.

Other "standard" translations include those of John Mavrogordato, Daniel Mendelsohn, Edmund Keeley, and Cavafy's brother John (some of the early poems). Take your pick!

What's left of the night

Ersi Sotiropoulos puts herself inside Cavafy's head during a short stay in Paris, whilst he and his brother John are on their way home from a trip to visit relatives in Britain in June 1897. The newspapers are full of the Dreyfus Affair, there is talk of Proust and Wilde and Baudelaire, the streets are full of distracting life and movement and beautiful young men, and Cavafy is struggling to find the self-confidence to carry on with his poetry. On the third night, after a grotesque and not very arousing visit to a notorious private club on the fringes of Paris (his guide insists on a stop at an equally notorious "cottage" on the way back), the poet rips up his work-in-progress and starts to get a clear sense of a voice that is recognisably his own.

This is probably a book to read when you are already fairly familiar with Cavafy as a poet - it's full of half-buried references to his poems and the subjects he deals with in them, many of which will probably pass you by if you haven't read them. It's an enjoyable historical novel with lots of very authentic-sounding but not unduly laboured period detail. And it gives us an interesting insight into what it might be like to be a modest genius who isn't quite sure that he is as clever as people tell him.

I don't know enough about Cavafy's biography to judge whether he really did have this kind of epiphany in 1897, but the book conveys a strong impression that Sotiropoulos must have immersed herself in everything written by and about him, so I imagine that it must be at least plausible in the context of what is known. Although I'm pretty sure she made up the bit about the single irritating pubic hair...

One oddity about this book - which otherwise ticks all the boxes for an LGBT-interest historical novel, right down to the strategically placed text over the genitals in the cover art - is that it doesn't appear to have an introduction by Edmund White. Surely New Vessel Press must have realised that that is a legal requirement when publishing a book of this kind in English? (Happily, White's name is prominent amongst the blurbers, and he has been doing promotional events together with the author and the translator, so it looks as though this omission was only a minor hiccup in the fabric of reality.)

---

"The god abandons Antony" - Keeley translation: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/god-abandons-antony
"The god forsakes Antony" - Dalven translation: http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2007/09/492-god-forsakes-antony-2-c-p-cava...

39rocketjk
jan 16, 2019, 6:29 pm

Regarding Greece, here's the review I posted in 2017 of Back to Delphi by Ionna Karystiani.



The writing in this book -- sentence level, richness of metaphor and characterizations -- is crazy good. Greek novelist Ionna Karystiani does an admirable job of putting her readers inside her two characters' minds. The problem is that those two minds are very dark places to spend much time. As the novel begins, Viv, a widow, has just picked up her grown son for a 5-day furlough from his prison cell. (This occurrence is presented without comment, leading me to believe that such furloughs are common practice in Greece.) Through flashback, we begin to learn about the events that have brought them to this spot, and why the relations between them are so strained. Stated briefly, the novel is about the ways in which Viv, unhappy since childhood, has unintentionally but indelibly impressed her own despair and fear of life upon her son, and about the consequences of that dynamic. It's not a question of evil, here, and there is a strong and sincere, if difficult, bond between parent and child, and one of the persistent themes is the struggle to attain a level of hope amidst unhappiness. The writing, as I said, is thrilling, and the people come alive. It's just that this is a hard world to spend time in. If that seems even remotely your cup of tea, though, I heartily recommend this book.

eta: I frankly don't know enough about current Greek society to know if this novel is intended as an allegory or in any other way highlights anything specifically Greek (rather than being a tale about human nature in general).

40LolaWalser
jan 17, 2019, 11:18 am

>39 rocketjk:

Very interesting. I placed a hold for an available book of hers, that one unfortunately is not allowed to circulate.

Your prison comment is well observed. Let's just say that a stint in prison, even for "respectable" men, is notably more common in Greece (and I'd say elsewhere in the Balkans) than in the West. Quite a lot of this has to do with a history of dictatorships and chronic political persecution, and local "warlording", where any two-bit official could send enemies for a do-over holiday in the gaol. Then there are the efforts, only a little less pointless than demanding religious conversion, to persuade inveterate tax dodgers, petty smugglers etc. to do right by the state, occasionally. Typically this means leaning on the small fry; even if the officialdom were less corrupt, there's little it can do against the powerful.

>38 thorold:

I'll read anything by or about Cavafy... :)

Should you happen to read Taïa by and by, I'd be glad to hear your opinions and discuss some things in more detail.

By the way, thanks for bringing up Del Castillo--now if only there was a chance in hell of digging out that book of his I have somewhere...

41thorold
jan 18, 2019, 9:02 am

Only borderline relevant to this theme, since it's by a non-Mediterranean writer and extends geographically way beyond our region, but I've been reading Klaus Mann's Alexander: Roman der Utopie (1929). Probably most interesting as an example of rather naïve orientalising by a young writer who still had a bit of growing-up to do. But there is a certain amount of admirable chutzpah in choosing one of the most famous generals in history as your subject when your interest in military matters goes no further than fantasising about soldiers' bodies...

>40 LolaWalser: I saw that our library had one Taïa novel (a different one from those you looked at, naturally) - watch this space!

42Dilara86
jan 18, 2019, 9:37 am

Rets d'éternité (Al-Luzumiyyat) by Abû L-Alâ Al-Ma'arrî, translated by Adonis and Anne Wade Minkowski





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Syria (then part of the Abbasid Caliphate)
Original language: Arabic
Translated into: French
Location: Poet's local environment (ie, the Levant)



Abû L-Alâ Al-Ma'arrî was born in 973 CE in a town called Maʿarra, near Aleppo and Antioch, in what is now Syria. His poems are classics in the Arab world, and your average educated Arabic speaker will be able to recite at least of few lines of his poetry, which for an author who died 1,000 years ago and whose work was partially lost during the Crusades, is extraordinary. Rets d’éternité contains a selection of poems taken from the Lûzumiyyat, which in its entirety is over 800 pages long. These aphoristic poems were translated into modern, straightforward French by Arabic-language poet and Nobel Prize contender Adonis and his French translator, Anne Wade Minkowski. The original work is written in a now-archaic form of Arabic and follows complicated rhyming patterns, no doubt to the despair of generations of schoolchildren, but reading this evocative prose-poetry translation is effortless. Subject matters feel amazingly contemporary. Al-Ma’arri is a bit of a pessimistic and misanthropic mardy bum. He thinks that the Earth doesn’t need people, and that people shouldn’t have children. Organised religion of any kind is a con, people are hypocrites, and the world is a Valley of Tears. In the foreword, Anne Wade Minkowski quotes Cioran, who speaking about Al-Ma’arri, said “Il nous a tous enfoncés” (He beat us all.) That gives you an idea of what to expect. I look forward to reading more of Al-Ma’arrî’s work.

Some of his poems:

O monde du mal
Nous ignorions que tes orants
Étaient de pieux dévots.

---

Combien de prêcheurs parmi nous ont prêché !
Combien de prophètes se sont dressés sur terre !
Ils ont disparu mais le malheur demeure.
Demeure aussi ton mal incurable.

---

La résidence sur terre m’est ennui.
Je fréquente une nation dont les princes règnent
À l’encontre de son bien.
Ils oppriment leurs sujets,
S’arrogent le droit de les duper
Et négligent leurs intérêts.
Ils sont pourtant leurs serviteurs…

---

Nous sommes dans le non-réel –
L’existence se déroule comme la mort,
Noces et funérailles se valent.


43thorold
jan 18, 2019, 3:30 pm

Picking up the gauntlet from >36 LolaWalser: - I read the one short novel by Abdellah Taïa they had in our local library. I was intrigued for similar reasons to Lola - there's not a whole lot of postcolonial LGBT writing out there, and almost none of it is from Arab writers. According to his English Wikipedia page, Taïa is the only openly gay Moroccan intellectual - it doesn't look as though that page has been updated in some years, though...

Taïa originally comes from Salé, which - rather disappointingly for us - turns out to be on Morocco's Atlantic coast. He has a doctorate in 18th century French literature from the Sorbonne - something you might not guess from his books - and now lives in Paris.

This is the novel that immediately preceded Celui qui est digne d'être aimé:

Un pays pour mourir : roman (2015) by Abdellah Taïa (Morocco, 1973- )

  

Zahira tells us about the death of her father in the family home in the Moroccan city of Salé, and about how she became a prostitute and moved to Paris; on the eve of surgery, her Algerian friend Aziz - another sex-worker - tells us about his experiences and why he feels he needs to become a woman; Mojtaba, an Iranian exile, writes to his mother to tell her that he's on the run from the Iranian secret services because of his role in student protests against the regime, and rather incautiously asks her to check up on the boyfriend he left behind; and we find out part of what happened to Zahira's aunt Zinab after she disappeared.

Taïa's style takes a bit of getting used to. His main characters in this book are angry, poorly educated people who speak French as a second language and use intonation and repetition to make their points, not sophisticated literary language. At first it feels a bit like being trapped next to a crazy person on the bus, but you soon get beyond that and start to see how Taïa is unpacking their complex personalities through the rant. It's all rather cleverer than it looks.

On the other hand, I'm not too sure that this really works as a novel. He picks up and drops his characters rather arbitrarily, and none of them finds any kind of closure within the text, not even implicitly. He's more interested in digging out the underlying problems that got them where they are than in telling us whether they stand a chance of arriving where they would like to be. And those problems are pretty much the ones we would expect: homophobia, oppression of women, colonialism, and racial prejudice between Arab and Black Moroccans. Obviously, having had first-hand experience, he's in a good position to tell us more about these issues than we could guess from our general knowledge, but there isn't space in this book for a huge amount of that sort of detail.

And I had one pretty big caveat: this is a book by a male writer in which two women talk in the first person about how being sex-workers has had a perversely empowering effect on their lives. I can understand how that could be, in the specific context of the book where the women wouldn't have had any control over their own lives if they'd stayed within the family, but all the same I think I would be more inclined to trust that sort of statement if it came from a female author.

So, having picked it up for the subject-matter, it turns out that it's the style I found more interesting...

44LolaWalser
jan 18, 2019, 7:13 pm

>43 thorold:

Wow that was fast, I didn't mean to push you. Overall that sounds very similar to the two novels I read, except that there's a mention of women who are not the author's/the author's heroes' mother and sisters. One of the problems I have with Taïa is the misogyny. I suppose one could argue he's just reflecting the "truth" of Morocco, but it's not that easily localised and to me at least, seems to belong to the author himself. While women didn't figure at all as independent characters in the books I read, the references to them still pointed to an extremely sexist and oddly antiquated (for such a young man, and one who spent nearly half his life in Paris at that) view of their proper roles, as well as their demonisation if they didn't abide by those roles.

I hope that aspect isn't more marked than it was in the two books I read because the rest of the stuff you mention is very interesting to me.

Unlike you, I find the themes more interesting than his style (which, frankly, I barely noticed), and it annoys me that he keeps leaving stuff... unifinished. Maybe what you say about "dropping characters" is one feature of that, I can't tell whether it's part of some plot to make the reader connect the dots AND colour inside the lines, or whether he genuinely has just that much and no more to say.

On colonialism, there's an odd sense that, like Ahmed, he too awakened to politics only in his forties. When he tries to formulate a political complaint he sounds the most banal, recycling hoary journalistic arguments--e.g. a mixed Arab/French couple has kids and they are given French, not Arab names--why? If only the teenage Ahmed had read Ngugi wa Thiong'o on teaching Austen to African British subjects in Kenya!

And yet he CAN write to amazing effect on this topic when he lets what he cares about the most be the guide to his thought, as the story of Lahbib shows. I'd rather not talk about it for fear of spoiling the mood if one should read it later.

It's not often I wish this, but he should write more, longer books, with some real density to them.

>42 Dilara86:

That sounds super-interesting, thanks. For when death looks sweet. :)

45LolaWalser
jan 18, 2019, 7:20 pm

Ah, maybe this will interest you, Mark (or anyone...)--a conversation between Taïa and Leïla Slimani from last year: Leïla Slimani & Abdellah Taïa: Le Maroc des Lumières

I noticed also that anger seems to be gaining in intensity and space in his work...

J’écris pour que le jeune Abdellah de 1995 si injustement une énième fois violé ait une voix. Une voix très en colère qui le porte lui et le monde autour de lui... Écrire c’est être en colère, pour moi... toujours...

46lriley
jan 19, 2019, 2:35 pm

So I ordered Aub's Field of Honour and that just came in the mail today. The Spanish Civil War has always fascinated me--that goes back to my dad. Butor's Spirit of Mediterranean places is also on order but hasn't shown up. Any case on the back cover of Aub's book is a blurb by the Catalonian Juan Goytisolo who is a great writer as well who kind of lived the latter years of his life in self-exile in Morocco.

47LolaWalser
Bewerkt: jan 20, 2019, 1:02 pm

>46 lriley:

I got that too.

There's a strange and unpleasant incident to relate in connection with Aub, through no fault of his, which I'd rather not have to deal with, but seeing how obscure he is in the English-speaking world, I'm afraid this stupid bizarre thing could be the first or only or foremost detail that surfaces for those who look him up.

In the Goncourt-winning novel Les Bienveillantes ("The Kindly Ones" in English) Jonathan Littell named his unrepentant Nazi hero "Max Aue" (Max short for Maximilian). At the time I decided to think of it as a grating coincidence, with Littell as likely to have, consciously or not, been inspired by the sound of, say, Hartmann von Aue (a medieval German poet probably far better known than Aub and destined to remain so).

Unfortunately, the similarity was noted more widely (as after all was to be expected sooner or later) and speculation about it published, without, as far as I know, Littell pronouncing on the matter. To make it worse, the smug French cretin who wrote about this in a pamphlet about the controversies around Littell's book made a casual footnote about Aub having written a book called "Crimes exemplaires" (the original is Crímenes ejemplares--I wrote briefly about it here), without having read it, so that his insufferably idiotic remark seems to find an explanation for Littell's choice of the name already in that fact alone (that Aub wrote a book by that title).

Crímenes ejemplares is a protest against the dehumanisation that poverty and exploitation wreak on Mexico's underclass. Max Aub was a Communist and a Jew who was repeatedly imprisoned in Europe and South America for his leftist activism.

Littell's character Max Aue is a German Nazi, unusually perverse even for that group, who enjoys killing and torturing people, takes part in the Holocaust with zeal, never repents, and escapes all punishment. (Littell is Jewish himself. I won't go into the controversy around his book, but only wish to note that there is a thick fog of ambiguity and bewilderment about his entire project, his intentions, methods etc. not helped by his refusal to talk to his critics.)

Two separate things to consider: one, Littell's choice of the name, which various people believe to have been entirely deliberate and self-serving, the real Max Aub's German-French Jewishness being used to colour the aura, so to speak, of his fictional character Max Aue. Some French critics even found a "reason" for dropping the "b" for the "e" in Littell's aim to thus signify his polymorphously perverse Nazi hero's wish to be/become a woman--the final "e" being mute in French and the whole name sounding, you know, soft. Oooo, castration by final e ablation--or is it castration by speaking French? (Littell's character is supposed to be a German writing in French.) The French are of course free to pronounce "Aue" as they like, but in German the "e" is sounded, ALL three vowels in "Aue" are separately sounded: Ah-Oo-Eh. Whether the name is any more "masculine" in this pronunciation, is not something I'd wish to discuss...

Two, if Littell did know he was using a real person's name for "inspiration", and even more, was actually alluding to this specific real person, to this person's ethnic background, did he do so knowing Aub's work, or knowing OF it, or even just the titles? Did the name "Max Aub" alone or in conjunction with, say, "Crimes exemplaires" as that dolt above suggests, give rise to some visions that were potent enough without or in spite of any concern for the real Max Aub and the meaning of his work?

Whatever the degree of Littell's consciousness about all this and whatever his intentions, there is now this unhappy, profoundly ugly connection to Aub who certainly deserved to be remembered for better reasons than this sordid context.

48thorold
jan 20, 2019, 4:28 pm

>44 LolaWalser: >45 LolaWalser: Thanks for the link to the interview. Hmm. I wonder how long Taïa can go without mentioning Isabelle Adjani...

I get the impression that Taïa’s work is very much shaped by his consciousness of being the poor boy who got a lucky break. He obviously feels that he owes a debt to the place he came from. The bit in the interview where they’re talking about how they might almost have met back in Morocco (had it not been for the fact that one of them was living in the slums and the other one was being a poor little rich girl) makes you wonder how much they are both gritting their teeth and trying hard not to say something tactless about each other.

I ought to read something by Leïla Slimani sometime as well! (But I got the impression from what people said about The perfect nanny that it was rather over-hyped.)

Not sure about the misogyny - two of the main characters in the book I read were women and a third was a male-to-female transsexual, all strong characters in charge of their own lives, and none of them were stereotypical downtrodden Arab housewives. But - as I said - the way they take charge of their lives is by being sex-workers, and what they aspire to is marriage with a rich man, running away to India to be a Bollywood star, and becoming Isabelle Adjani, respectively. Whereas the gay man is an intellectual involved in political protest and journalism. Either he’s doing it on purpose, reminding us that it isn’t a level playing-field out there, or that’s how he sees women’s role.

Yes, a long Taïa novel would be interesting.

49lriley
jan 20, 2019, 4:46 pm

#47--a very strange story. It's too bad that Crimenes ejemplares isn't translated. I would like to read that. I have read a lot of French literature but it's all in translation. I haven't read the Kindly Ones though. Literature is an ocean and it's impossible to read everything. It's been noted by some that numerous German and Nazi aristocrats and military figures during the 30's and 40's were very much and all about public displays of their masculinity while at the same time a number of those weren't adverse to lipstick and makeup (Goring just being the most notorious). It sometimes seems there are some similarities between them and Catholic priests of today. Maybe that is in part something that Littell had in mind when drawing up his character Aue. The writer Aub doesn't seem to fit that kind of a profile though--so it does seem weird.

50LolaWalser
jan 20, 2019, 7:51 pm

>49 lriley:

Indeed. Very few people, even historic Nazis (or Catholic priests), fit the profile of Littell's character, who makes the general trend of caricatures look photorealistic. He's the Nazi for those who see them in the hysterical, homophobic, Grand Guignol imagery of "Cabaret" and "Ilse the She-Wolf of the SS". I don't mean to be kind to the actual Nazis--I'm annoyed at using carnivalesque exaggerations that distract from the real horror, which is the masses of perfectly ordinary people committing extraordinary evil. There was a lot of claptrap about how Littell wanted "everyone" to imagine what they'd have done in Aue's place--right, because any of us could have been a "refined", highly cultured homosexual/bisexual probably transgender sadist, crook, and murderer (including the cold-blooded murder of his own mother), whose chief pleasure in life was being sodomized by his twin sister. Happens every day.

But I've digressed enough; if Aub had been alive, I've no doubt Littell would have been compelled to address this point once it had been published and disseminated. But Aub is dead, I don't know whether his estate or anyone reached out and received an explanation, given Littell's refusal to discuss the book his silence on this matter is almost understandable, as he's bound to look either an asshole or a fool.

>48 thorold:

I haven't read Slimani either (and who knew she was so gorgeous?), but I guess I might yet, theoretically. I've seen some little chat about Chanson douce and remember thinking, "nah, Ousmane Sembène's Black girl is where it's at for me on that topic."

51thorold
Bewerkt: jan 23, 2019, 5:22 am

Pierre Assouline won the 2011 Prix Mediterranée for Vies de Job (which I still want to read, because I've also read Job novels by Joseph Roth and Muriel Spark fairly recently). But his most recent book was the one that came to hand first, and it seems to fit in very well with the theme:

Retour à Séfarad (2018) by Pierre Assouline (France, Morocco, 1953- )

  

1492, as we all know, was the year when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. But it was also the year when the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand & Isabella conquered Granada, the last Islamic stronghold on the western European mainland, and issued the Alhambra Decree under which Spanish Jews were forced to choose between conversion and exile. The 100,000 or so who chose to go into exile (estimates of the number vary and are hotly disputed), mostly to North Africa or the Ottoman Empire, maintained strong emotional and linguistic links with their former homeland in Iberia, which they traditionally referred to as Sepharad (in the Hebrew scriptures, Sepharad was the most distant country Jews lived in during the Babylonian exile - probably not Iberia, but Sardis).

In the process of post-Franco reconciliation, Spain has taken its time to normalise its relations with Jews - recognising Israel in 1986, apologising for (but not rescinding) the Alhambra Decree on its 500th anniversary in 1992, and offering Jews with ties to Spain a simplified route to Spanish citizenship in 2015. "How we've missed you," King Felipe VI said in his speech at a reception for Sephardi Jews to mark the passing into law of this new measure.

The French writer Pierre Assouline, a lifelong hispanophile who was born in Casablanca into a Sephardi family that fled from Seville after the pogroms of the late 14th century, decided to take the King's invitation literally and immediately made an appointment with the Spanish consulate in Paris to apply for a passport. His novel Retour à Séfarad engagingly chronicles his experience of navigating the bureaucratic hurdles involved in this process in parallel with a detailed analysis of Spain's relationship with Jews, his friends' views about what he's doing, and the way the process has affected his own notions about his identity and his complicated relationship with a "homeland" from which he has been excluded for five centuries.

For Assouline, Spain is above all the country of Cervantes, Goya, Miguel de Unamuno, Federico García Lorca and Andrés Segovia. The whole book is one long succession of affectionate Quijote references, down to the chapter-headings. But of course it's also the country of the Inquisition, the Civil War and Franco. And a food-culture that revolves almost entirely around ham-worship. And a conversational style that has much in common with bullfighting. And a village that has only very recently changed its name from Castrillo Matajudíos (Castrillo kill-the-Jews). And a new cult of philosephardism that seems to have nothing to do with actual Jews and everything to do with PR and tourism.

This sometimes comes over as a slightly precious book, but Assouline also clearly enjoys sending up his own image as a hardcore French intellectual. In between meetings with famous names, he has strangers ask him if he's a librarian or bookseller, because of the way he keeps quoting from books. Others embarrassingly mistake him for the ultra-glossy publisher of art books, Prosper Assouline ("no relation, but from the same tribe"). He frequently tells us about unrealised plans - places he didn't go to and people he didn't interview because he was afraid of the way he would react to them. Well-meaning friends try to introduce him to influential people who could give his passport application a nudge forward, but he turns shy and runs away at the last minute. I was amused when he meets Javier Cercas to discuss his ideas for the book, and Cercas suggests to him that he should treat it as a cocido (a traditional Iberian hotpot that can contain an astonishing variety of different ingredients) - Cercas went on to use the very same image himself to describe the process of writing one of his recent books.

One of the most memorable anecdotes (in a book that sometimes seems to be nothing but anecdotes) has nothing to do with Spain at all - Assouline recalls an article he wrote in the late 1970s about antisemitism in France. His technique was to interview prominent people associated with antisemitic views and ask them the single question "What did the Jews ever do to you?". Most of the responses he gets are fairly predictable and formulaic, and then it occurs to him that he ought to interview at least one Muslim. The most prominent he could find was an Iranian exile called Ruhollah Khomeini - he asks him the question and gets the one-word answer: "Nothing". End of interview.

I found this a very interesting and enjoyable book to read, but I'm not really sure if it took me anywhere in particular, apart from clarifying and deepening some of the impressions I've already formed about Spanish culture. It's not really a book about Sephardi culture, although that does come into it, of course. But I did, slightly unexpectedly, find myself engaging with Assouline's reflections on the notions of nationality and identity and to what extent they are things we can determine for ourselves. Very relevant in these times. One of Assouline's friends tells him, quite seriously, that a second passport is never a luxury for a Jew. I think you could easily extend that and say that in these times, it's not a luxury for any of us...

52LolaWalser
jan 24, 2019, 12:19 pm

>51 thorold:

Such a good write-up, I feel no special need to read the book myself... I believe I have quite a few in the same vein, from similar personalities. Assouline's biography of Hergé, btw, ranges very interestingly in the historical and political background and throws light on colonialism (specifically Belgian) from an unusual angle. (Btw, I read recently, don't remember where, that some? all? libraries in the US have officially banned Tintin au Congo from open circulation. Reading the bio I was surprised to learn how many changes it went through since the original newspaper publication, beginning in, IIRC, 1940s.)

53thorold
Bewerkt: jan 24, 2019, 4:37 pm

>52 LolaWalser: I don’t think you’re missing much - it was fun to read, but the little bit that Assouline adds to everything else you’ve read about Spain could probably be fitted into one short newspaper article...

If I read one of his biographies, Simenon would probably be my first choice. I’ve seen a few websites, exhibitions and documentaries about Hergé and feel I’ve pretty much exhausted my curiosity there. Tintin au Congo bizarrely climbed right up the bestseller charts in the UK for a while when Ann Widdecombe leapt to its defence against the CRE. Not the first person I’d look to for BD recommendations!

54thorold
Bewerkt: jan 25, 2019, 6:08 am

>7 SassyLassy: mentioned Sciascia above and reminded me that I've never read any of his books. And it's ages since I've tried to read anything more substantial than a menu in Italian (although - to be fair - some of those menus were nearly as long as this very short novel, and far richer in adjectives...):

Il giorno della civetta (1961; The day of the owl, 1964) by Leonardo Sciascia (Italy, 1921-1989)

  

Leonardo Sciascia wrote extensively about Sicilian history, geography and politics as well as publishing the occasional crime novel. He was active in local and national politics for much of his career, and served as a left-wing deputy in the Italian parliament.

Il giorno della civetta is an unusual sort of crime novel - it comes with an afterword in which the author explains that he spent nearly a year on "making it shorter", and it's hard to spot anything in this 140-page story that isn't absolutely essential. We don't get to see the detective choosing his lunch, rippling his chest muscles or juggling four girlfriends (as we would expect to in a Montalbano story), characters simply don't exist outside the context of the case (and in many cases don't even have names), and descriptions of people and places are stripped down to the barest minimum we need to follow the story. In the one place where Sciascia allows himself to dwell for a paragraph or so on the architecture of a police station it turns out that it's crucial for us to know that you can see into one particular room from another, for example.

In the fifties and sixties the received opinion in northern Italy seems to have been that the Sicilian Mafia had been wiped out before the War, under the Fascist police chief Mora (who was not bound by any finicky little constitutional limitations of power), and that Sicily was now a quiet, civilised province, albeit not the sort of place respectable people were likely to have any reason to visit. If northern Italians ever thought about the Mafia at all, then it was as operatic brigands or as a kind of rural benevolent society helping peasant farmers to survive.

What Sciascia wants to do with this book is to shake that complacency and show people outside Sicily what organised crime really means, and the nasty things that happen to a society when a criminal organisation is allowed to take over the role normally filled by government and the rule of law. And how difficult it is to get out of that situation.

A local building contractor is gunned down in a Sicilian village square on his way to take the early-morning bus into town (fascinating to reflect that there was a time before the age of the White Van when builders actually travelled on public transport...). The Carabinieri investigate, and soon find out that he has been shot after refusing an invitation to pay protection money. They get a name for the assassin, and Captain Bellodi arrests him and even manages to persuade him to make a statement confessing the murder, but then the case hits a brick wall - any further action by the police is blocked by politicians in Rome who clearly owe favours to the same people as paid for the killing. Bellodi quietly goes on sick-leave whilst his deputy recategorises the crime as the result of sexual jealousy.

But this isn't just a political lesson - Sciascia is clearly a very competent writer, and sometimes - as in the dialogues between Bellodi and the three Mafia figures he has to interrogate - displays remarkable technical skill as well as subtlety and efficiency in the way he characterises people.

I was impressed by a wonderful description of a farcical parliamentary debate in which the secretary of state barefacedly denies the existence of the Mafia (we have previously seen the same man giving a speech on a balcony with the local Capo on one side of him and a notorious hitman on the other) and is saved from any actual questioning when the right-wing deputies get into a slanging match with the Communists. This struck me as owing a lot to Zola when I read it, but according to Sciascia it's the one scene in the book that was taken directly from life.

55lriley
jan 25, 2019, 8:51 am

#54--I've read several of Sciascia's books and liked all of them a lot. They tend to be short. He reminds me in a way of Jean-Patrick Manchette as there seems to be almost nothing extra in the text that doesn't need to be there. They're boiled down to the essentials of what he's trying to convey. He's not a time waster.

56thorold
jan 25, 2019, 9:37 am

>55 lriley: Yes - I’ve only read one Manchette and this one Sciascia so far, but they do seem to have something in common.

57LolaWalser
jan 25, 2019, 12:11 pm

I'm not a fan. Wouldn't think to compare him to Manchette either, to me they do completely different things, Sciascia being determinedly political, Manchette... hardly at all. (But I only read two of his.)

Funny you should mention detective Montalbano, Mark, Sciascia and Camilleri were great friends, even after they fell out politically in the seventies (Camilleri is a lifelong Communist, Sciascia ended up centre-right). But I guess you knew that.

The peril of reading Zola is finding Zola everywhere. :)

I can think of nothing more Italian than slanging matches between fascists and Communists.

58thorold
jan 25, 2019, 12:26 pm

>57 LolaWalser: I can think of nothing more Italian than slanging matches between fascists and Communists.

What about arguments (between men) about the best sort of olive oil?

59LolaWalser
Bewerkt: jan 25, 2019, 12:57 pm

>58 thorold:

Totally legit, totally Med. Been there, seen that. :) WARS could start over damn olives. In fact I bet you some time somewhere they did... Also figs, fish, grapes, wine, any number or kind of handiwork--all this before we get to stuff like girls or what really matters, goats and donkeys.

The cradle of the Occident! :)

Speaking of which...

60LolaWalser
jan 25, 2019, 2:17 pm

In 1962 when he was 73, Martin Heidegger visited Greece for the first time. A short travel journal relating to this trip was published posthumously in 1989 as Aufenthalte, translated into English as Sojourns: the journey to Greece.

Heidegger set out on this trip hoping to discover the Greece of Hölderlin's yearnings, the ideal place/space where humans (well, European humans anyway) came in contact with the gods, "the divine", "the holy", and that as a matter of everyday traffic. Mostly he was frustrated, the hallowed "Greek essence" remaining stubbornly absent to his perception. Corfu, the first bit of Greece to appear to those onboard the cruise ship Yugoslavia, looked disappointingly like Italy. Olympia was a plain village busy getting even more disfigured by modern construction. Heidegger found it
"unthinkable {...} that this very landscape, which one could find in Italy, was established as the place of Greek festival... {...} The wide and almost charming valley of the Alpheus was, only through an inexplicable force, in keeping with the agonistic severity and articulation of the Greek essence. Doubts arose again whether this essence, long-cherished and often thought through, was a creature of fancy without any connection to what actually had been."


I'd say those doubts were well-entertained, but, finally on Delos he feels he found the ideal Greece, the physical place he can relate to the metaphysical space that engendered what after all matters to him the most, the Greek language, as THE language, and Greek thought, THE thought.

Only through the experience of Delos did the journey to Greece become a sojourn, cleared {gelichteten} dwelling by that which ἀλήθεια is. Delos itself is that field of the unconcealed hiddenness that accords sojourn: first to φύσις, to the pure and self-sheltered rise of mountains and islands, sky and sea, plants and animals, the rise where each thing appears in its strict type but also in its gently suspended form. In the sojourn granted by ἀλήθεια the ἔργον appears as well: everything that is made and built by human work. In this granted sojourn, the mortals themselves appear and precisely as those who respond to the unconcealed, for they bring to their proper appearance that which becomes present in this or that manner. All of this, however, occurs in the face of the gods and in their service, whose nearness was once occasioned because of the concealed un-concealment. An early endowment took place, in response to its call, thinking {Denken} was to become recollection{Andenken} and as such thanksgiving {Danken}.


Heidegger wrestles with the inimical modern world of technology and tourists for a few more such "sojourns" but Delos remains an exception. Does this mean you should rush Delos-way for a unique experience of "Greek essence"? Probably not, at least not without indulging in the fumes of Being and time first.

Well, I'm not bothered to hide my aversion to the old Nazi who found that "The Mediterranean crowd was full of life and yet unreal in comparison with the memory of what we had experienced" and avoided all mention of the horrors that the German occupation brought to Greece, including the worst famine of the 20th century in Europe. Banging about the athletes-kings is too facho-macho for my taste; there's something deeply unseemly about philosophers being reverent about sports, stinks of those midget frights with inferiority complexes like Evola and D'Annunzio and all that histrionic pomaded ilk.

Still I find this not only interesting but something I will keep returning to in discussing what I call "metaphysical travel", which for me (and oodles of classicists, no doubt) is almost synonymous with "Mediterranean travel". But not just travel, journeying, but existing in the Mediterranean, sojourning in the Mediterranean. As one of the people, one of the crowd appearing so "full of life" but "unreal", in comparison to the figments of his imagination, to Heidegger and other discounters of humanity. And also as a "metaphysical traveller" in my own right.

61dypaloh
jan 25, 2019, 4:27 pm

>60 LolaWalser:
Your comment, “there's something deeply unseemly about philosophers being reverent about sports,” put me in mind of something the Cretan, Nikos Kazantzakis, wrote: “Civilization begins at the moment sport begins.”

But then Nikos goes on to say, “When Greece began to decline, the athlete’s body began at the same time to hypertrophy and kill his mind. Euripides was among the first to protest: he proclaimed what risks the spirit was running at the hands of athleticism.”

Hey, what’s a little killing of the mind and risk to one’s spirit? Well, a lot, of course. But I’d better not mull this over too much just now—could quench my interest in the upcoming Super Bowl.

62LolaWalser
jan 25, 2019, 6:18 pm

>61 dypaloh:

Isn't it interesting how similar is that argument to complaints in the US about the overvaluation of college sports at the expense of academic achievement? :)

I have no idea how successful were Greeks in achieving the ideal of a balanced mental and physical development in the average citizen, but it's curious that, say, the German and Anglo iterations of this pedagogical model managed only, roughly, to focus on one side--the modernised Prussian educational system developed the institution of "Gymnasium", a high school devoted primarily to the classics (Heidegger went to one), but falling rather short on the physical training that its ancient Greek namesake was providing; the American "gym" today is a place for physical training only. It's as if brawn and brains went hand in hand rather less often than the boy's own genre would have us believe.

Maybe--and I am joking but I think Heidegger may have thought so seriously--you just have to have Greece, the physical space, in order to take care of both body and spirit in this ideally balanced way.

No wonder he and so many other Western philhellenes favoured the abstract ideal derived from books and the generations of commentators, over looking at the contemporary place and people...

63lriley
jan 25, 2019, 7:43 pm

I agree there are more dissimilarities between Sciascia and Manchette than similarities. That's really not a great comparison on my part. The similarity I find is in they both keep things pretty much short and concise. They are both excellent at noir writing. They kill practically everything that's ever come out of North America in that regard. And Sciascia is definitely the more political-- and if you read through a few of his you'll probably find that the church and the mafia are almost if not wedded. Manchette was somewhat connected to the situationists but his novels tend to be more action packed noirs while Sciascia's are more contemplative.

64LolaWalser
jan 25, 2019, 8:58 pm

I don't see Sciascia as a noir writer, or any kind of genre writer really, but maybe that's because his themes are too painfully familiar, and that is bleak for genre entertainment. I can see where it may appear differently to those with more distance. To me he'd be closer to true crime--another example would be Roberto Saviano, whose Gomorra, about the situation in Naples with endemic gang crime (the camorra), is semi-fictionalised in Sciascia's tradition.

Yes, the first Manchette I read, La Position du tireur couché (The prone gunman as the touchstone says), blew me away, it was totally unexpected. The second one (hmm, no English translation, won't bother linking) was a bit of a letdown after that but he's definitely on my radar for more.

65librorumamans
jan 25, 2019, 9:05 pm

Thanks, all, for these recent posts. Leonardo Sciascia goes on the list of unread authors to sample.

No one so far has mentioned The Yacoubian Building. Although set in Cairo, which I suppose is not really Mediterranean, it seems to look at Egyptian society in general, which is.

66lriley
Bewerkt: jan 25, 2019, 10:23 pm

#64--I've read Saviano and that's not actually too far off--apart from whatever the real difference is between the Mafia and the Camorra and there's not much as far as I can tell. Sciascia certainly could be looked at as kind of fictionalized Saviano apart that is from his book on Aldo Moro which read like straight up non-fiction to me. The book I really liked most of all of Manchette's was Three to Kill. The violence in that is kind of over the top.

67thorold
Bewerkt: jan 26, 2019, 5:21 am

>60 LolaWalser: - >66 lriley: Fun!

Manchette and Sciascia
...as I said, I’ve only read one of each. On that limited evidence, Manchette is political in an anti-establishment, satirical sort of way (the one I read was L’affaire N’Gustro, Manchette is slinging mud indiscriminately at the crypto-fascist right and the self-important left, with a bit left over for corrupt post-colonial dictators), whilst Sciascia does politics in a more didactic way. Manchette wants to provoke us and demonstrate how clever he is with words, Sciascia wants to get the message across as precisely as he can. But both super-efficient with words, as lriley said.

mens sana
Isn’t this part of the Elgin Marbles/“battle of Marathon was won on the playing-fields of Eton” thing, the north-European conviction that because we’ve had a classical education and read Winkelmann, we’re better at being Greek than the people who merely live there? Which is perhaps just another version of the thing Barbara Tuchman writes about, where Protestants convince themselves that they are the true “chosen people” and better Zionists than the actual Jews.

The philosophy vs. P.T. thing reminds me of Klaus Mann and his short-skirted Macedonians. And then there’s the whole bizarre story of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and gymnastics-as-revolution...
(Conspicuously fails to put Heidegger on reading list.)

68thorold
jan 26, 2019, 5:35 am

...Germans and the Mediterranean also reminds me of a book I read a couple of years ago, on the recommendation of someone here - Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus, a novel based on the true story of a man in the DDR who was so determined to make his pilgrimage to the sites of antiquity that he spent years planning an elaborate and dangerous escape to the west, which he eventually managed to carry out. Once out, he made his visit to Italy, admired the places he was supposed to admire, and then went home to the DDR. By which time it was 1988, and they were so puzzled at the idea of someone trying to get back into their country that they didn’t know what to do with him...

69LolaWalser
jan 26, 2019, 1:02 pm

>68 thorold:

I don't know that guy but I love that guy.

>67 thorold:

that because we’ve had a classical education and read Winkelmann, we’re better at being Greek than the people who merely live there?

In a certain way it could be true, couldn't it--IF all that matters is one's own pre-defined notions. Reality can bugger right off, it's just a nuisance.

Heidegger probably wasn't being that simplistic but he does seem to look only for a meeting with an idea of his. Which I don't think is reprehensible at all (if heavyweight philosophers weren't entitled to travel for the sake of ideas rather than a suntan and calamari, who would be), I'm just fascinated that he believed he found what he was looking for. When all he had were dreams of ancient Greece constructed out of fragments of re(-re-re-re...)writings and pictures of fragments of things. And yet he knew exactly what "Greek essence" would be and what is not it, knew it for decades before setting foot in Greece.

The horror of idealism, that's what we're dealing with here. Also its pathos.

There are few mentions of the practical incidents of the travel other than the direction of displacement. No individuals, even "I" appears only once, the rest is in the first person plural. The routine chaos of Greek life breaks through a few times, those are moments of distress and doubt. He hates being reminded of modernity and yet we swim in modernity.

Interesting the spots he refuses to visit--Patmos for instance. Too Christian? Would distract from the sought-after vibe, I guess.

Sorry to go on so tediously--I don't mean to turn onto the topic of travel as such either, but there's this vague notion I have of everyday life in the Med (especially) being a kind of stationary travel, every day, something like these "sojourns" of Heidegger's. It's not travelling "back in time" because one isn't in fact doing any such thing as travelling back in time, it's rather existing tensed between where your body is (usually simple enough) and where your mind is. Where is the mind in the Med? Like the multiple souls of some eastern mythologies, each in pursuit of a different task, the Med mind is divided, routinely, between epochs constantly jostling for attention and input. The poorest fellahin born in the shadow of the pyramids know they are as old as the pyramids when they know nothing else. There is such a burden of memories that living people exist like museum exhibits, in this enormous, physical museum. And if rocks and walls are dumb and might let us be new, feel new and first and clean and innocent, the words, the books won't let us.
Heck, run away from school all you want, sooner or later you get some old German dude reciting Homeric hymns at you from his cruise ship.

Oh look, I said sorry and went on even more tediously... nnnn--as Pascal wrote, sorry, no time to make it brief, but in future I'll try to think on this some more and post less!

70thorold
jan 27, 2019, 11:29 am

Another example that leapt out across my path today whilst I was thinking of something else is Arthur Hugh Clough's unexpectedly comic take on the Englishman-in-Rome theme, Amours de voyage, where the unfortunate central character can't decide whether he should concentrate on contemplating the marbles in quiet ecstasy, courting the lovely English young lady who keeps crossing his path, or laying down his life for the (1849) revolution that is falling to pieces around him. Clough seems to be arguing that engaging with the life that's going on in front of you always takes precedence over aesthetic pursuits and abstract speculation.

(more detailed review in my CR thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/301163#6719563)

>69 LolaWalser: as Pascal wrote, sorry, no time to make it brief

Thanks - that solves one minor puzzle I had ticking away in the back of my brain, anyway - I'd heard it attributed to all the usual anglo-saxon suspects (Wilde, Twain, Churchill...) whilst Sciascia in his Note attributes it to "un francese (o una francesa) del gran settecento". But Pascal seems to be confirmed by solid evidence. (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/) :-)

71LolaWalser
jan 28, 2019, 11:47 am

Ha, yes, Pascal was quite quippy for a dour jansenist god-botherer.

72thorold
feb 1, 2019, 5:33 am

Luis Landero won the Prix Méditerranée étranger in 1992 with Juegos de la edad tardía. That wasn't available in the library, but this more recent book was. Neither Madrid nor the bit of Extremadura where Landero grew up is very Mediterranean, but there are plenty of donkeys, goats and chickpeas in the book (even a few olives), so maybe it passes the test...

El balcón en invierno (2014) by Luis Landero (Spain, 1948- )

  

Landero describes sitting down to write a novel (he even gives us the first few pages of it) and then, as he looks down into the street from his Madrid balcony, having one of those "life's too short" moments that we all have from time to time as we get older. He feels that he's only going through the motions with fiction, and that he has something more important, more uniquely his own, that he needs to commit to paper before he gets to the end of his writing career.

Through a series of vignettes taken from his own memories and the testimony of his elderly mother and other family members and friends, he draws a picture of his family's life on the farm and in the small country town where he spent his early childhood (Alburquerque, on the Portuguese border in Extremadura), their migration to Madrid in 1960 and the various jobs he had as a teenager - shop-worker, apprentice mechanic, clerk, guitarist - and the slow discovery of the pleasures of the written word that eventually made him become first a student and then a teacher of literature.

Landero is not, of course, the first writer to come to the conclusion that the past is a foreign country, but he does give us a very clear insight into the astonishing and irreversible way that the world can change within a single lifetime, from the essentially illiterate, unmechanised peasant culture he was born into, in which oral storytelling and the passing on of knowledge from generation to generation was so central and papers, machines, and travel were things reserved for "la gente gorda" (the fat people - i.e. non-peasants), to the world he lives in now, where everything is written down and his most important manual skill is changing printer cartridges. The adult Luis can watch people passing in the street without knowing anything about them, and he can reflect on the beauty of the countryside he grew up in - both things that would have been incomprehensible to his grandparents.

For Luis's father, the discovery of the opportunities offered by the modern world outside the village seems to have far outweighed the horror of the things he experienced whilst serving in the Civil War, and in his ambitious mind it was Luis who was going to benefit from those opportunities and become one of the fat people, even if it meant that his mother and sisters had to turn their own Madrid apartment into a sweat-shop and work all hours of the day and night at their irons and their sewing-machines. But the father himself never manages to come to terms with the new life his ambitions have brought the family into - he can't find a job in the city that suits his idea of who he should be, he becomes a feared domestic tyrant instead of the loving husband and father Luis is sure he would have liked to be, he sleeps with a Chekhovian pistol under his pillow, and eventually depression gets the better of him.

Although some of the subject-matter of this story is pretty grim, it is really the childhood memories of peasant life before 1960 that shine through and stick in your mind after reading it. The grandmother's stories, the life of the farmyard and chicken-run, the magic of the journey between campo and pueblo and the plants, birds and landscape that served as landmarks along it, the pedlars who take the track over the border from Portugal with their donkeys and bicycles, the awful realisation that it will soon be October and time to go back to school. All wonderful, ordinary things it would be impossible to go back to without this kind of record of the memories of the dwindling group of people who can still remember them.

73thorold
Bewerkt: feb 1, 2019, 5:40 am

>72 thorold: ...and even if it hadn't been such an interesting read, it would have been worth it for the small joy of finding out that the Albuquerque in New Mexico also used to be an Alburquerque but lost its first "r" somewhere along the line of anglicisation. A piece of information about as useful as knowing that Queens' and Magdalene are in Cambridge whilst Queen's and Magdalen are in Oxford...

74Dilara86
feb 1, 2019, 9:00 am

El balcón en invierno sounds fantastic!

I just finished Les Poètes de la Méditerranée (Poets of the Mediterranean), edited by Eglal Errera





Writers’ genders: All
Minority count: Küçük Iskender is a Turkish poet who’s gay and out. One of his poems in the anthology has a gay theme.
Writers’ nationalities: Every Mediterranean country
Original languages: Greek, Turkish, Arabic, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Maltese, Croatian, Slovene, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin (?), Albanian, Macedonian (?), and possibly other languages or dialects I did not spot

Translated into: French on the right page, with the original poem on the left page
Location: When applicable, the Mediterranean



I found this poetry anthology by typing “Méditerranée” into my local library’s search engine. These poems by 101 contemporary authors (ie, alive in 2010) from every country in or around the Mediterranean Sea were collected by writer and film-maker Eglal Errera, who did a very good job. Every place is represented, even the smallest, such as Cyprus, Malta and Palestine. The poems don’t necessarily have a direct connection with the Mediterranean, but many do, or at least, give a sense of the place. Obviously, I enjoyed some poets and poems more than others, but overall, this was a fantastic book. Since I’ve started reading mostly library books about a year ago, this is the first time I wished I didn’t have to give a book back. And of course, it’s such a perfect fit for Reading Globally’s Mediterranean World quarter, it almost feels like cheating! I get to tick all the countries on the list with just one book! Most authors were unknown to me, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to discover new voices. There were also some famous names, such as Ismail Kadaré, Andrée Chedid, Adonis, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Roubaud and Abdellatif Laabi. After adding every name to the list of Mediterranean authors I’ve read so far this quarter (Post #2 in my quarterly thread on Club Read – every author that’s NOT underlined is a poet from this anthology), I can see that the majority have a LT page, and a good number of them were translated into English. There was quite a bit of cross-pollination, with some poets dedicating their poems to another poet in the anthology, or being featured for their poetry and for their translations of other poets’ work. I don’t know whether this is because the poetry world is small, or because Eglal Errera made her choices from a limited and possibly incestuous set of authors… In any case, the poems themselves were varied in tone, style and subject matter. And I loved the anthology’s multilingual approach, with the original poem on the left, and the translation on the right.

75Dilara86
feb 1, 2019, 10:56 am

Palmyre : L'irremplaçable trésor (Palmyra: An Irreplaceable treasure) by Paul Veyne





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: French
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A, but there is an English version
Location: Palmyra, Syria


This slim non-fiction paperback was published in May 2016, following the destruction of Ancient Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, by Islamic State. It is dedicated to Khaled al-Assaad, Palmyra's head of antiquities who was murdered by IS. The text is a reworking of a long foreword Paul Veyne wrote in 2001 for an art book about Palmyra, Palmyre, métropole caravanière. Veyne’s writing is precise and methodical; his descriptions are clear, detailed and evocative. Stylistically, it reminded me of Lavisse’s history books: it was at once accessible and old-fashioned, with its use of the past subjunctive and its somewhat patronising view of the “man on the street”. Still, it is a very good starting point for exploring the history of Palmyra and Queen Zenobia. It would have been even better with a bibliography and a few photos.

76Dilara86
feb 2, 2019, 9:55 am

La marcheuse (Al macha’a - The Blue Pen) by Samar Yazbek, translated by Khaled Osman





Writer’s gender: Female
Writer’s nationality: Syrian
Original language: Arabic
Translated into: French
Location: Damascus and Ghouta
First published in 2017, French translation published in 2018, no English translation at present, but I found a summary in English here: http://www.rayaagency.org/clients/yazbek-samar/the-blue-pen/


Rima is a young woman who lives with her mum and older brother in Damascus, as it descends into war. She has selective mutism and is a compulsive walker who is tied at all times to either a piece of furniture or a relative to ensure she doesn’t run off and disappear into the distance. This is her story, written down with a blue ballpoint pen on spare pieces of paper, in the cellar where she ends up abandoned and unable to untie herself to escape bombs and chemical attacks. I didn’t hate it, but I found this novel unconvincing and I felt manipulated. At least, it was a quick read.

77LolaWalser
Bewerkt: feb 2, 2019, 1:15 pm

>76 Dilara86:

Thanks for bringing her up, sounds different enough to pique interest anyway.

I've two more Moroccan books to discuss but before that just a quick note on Jean Giono's Voyage en Italie, based on a car trip undertaken in the early 1950s. Despite an Italian (Piemontese) ancestor, this was Giono's first visit to the major cities he mentions here: Turin, Milan, Verona, Brescia, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence... - and, at greatest length, Venice. Giono disliked travel, hated the sea, had strong opinions on the right life and an even stronger need to feel happy, the combination of which factors would seem to augur one of those sometimes-entertaining anti-travel travel books--and partly it's there. A curmudgeon he is, more sarcastic than loveable, although he endeared himself to me when, having been served the insufferable insult of a subpar dish of fried sole, he launched into a page-and-a-half rant about the proper way to cook fish. You could practically see the tears of outrage brimming from the sentences. I'm not making fun of him (much), it's an utterly deserved reaction and his method, by the way, is impeccable.

Somewhere half-way he seems to become reconciled to the fact that he's *shudder* travelling and the writer takes over completely, grasping everywhere for material and starting to weave fictions from anecdotes and observations. The chapter on Venice, in particular the characterology of Venetians, is some of the more peculiar stuff I've read or heard said about the city, but there are several very well observed moments and scenes. Overall this is an unusual, idiosyncratic view of places that could well do with a respite from clichés.

78lriley
Bewerkt: feb 2, 2019, 3:09 pm

#77--I've read a number of Giono's books--the best two of which IMO have the character of a 19th century Italian revolutionary Angelo Pardo and they are The Horseman on the roof and The Straw Man. Horseman was made into a movie and I think Juliette Binoche was the main star. Basically Pardo on a harrowing journey throughout the Provencal region (where Giono was born) that's in the throes of a cholera epidemic. Pardo comes across a lady ( the same played by Binoche in the movie version) and gets her home safely to her husband. There's great attraction between these two but it never quite overcomes either's sense of honor. It's kind of a suspenseful swashbuckling romance but very well done. The Straw Man is more of a historical novel and kind of comparable to Emile Zola's The debacle. Zola also has connections to Provence. It's more of a war novel pretty much based around---and here my history is probably a little bit shaky--the rebellion of the Italian population against the Austrian army that then occupied their country--roughy 1860's--1870's. Pardo is IMO the best character that Giono ever drew up. He has this acute sense of justice which almost always puts him on the wrong side of powerful people and he always takes the hardest and most direct path. That lends a bit of Quixote-ish humor which is a quality in shorter supply in most everything else I've read by Giono.

But anyway Giono also wrote a lot about WWI. It was a very bitter experience for him. The regiment he joined fought at Verdun and of that original regiment there was only something like 20 of them that survived the war and I believe Giono was gassed.

79thorold
feb 2, 2019, 4:07 pm

>77 LolaWalser: >78 lriley: interesting - I only knew about Giono from the sanctimonious but worthy tree-planting, never bothered to look any further.

80lriley
feb 2, 2019, 5:03 pm

#79--Not a fan either of the man who planted trees. Not that that is a bad idea--just didn't care for the book. Giono did not grow up near the sea. His was a kind of mountainous and rural region. Farmers and sheepherders and small villages. It was a refuge across the border for Italians on the outs for whatever reason or at least that's the impression I got from Giono's auto-biographical novel Blue Boy-- the father of Jean le Bleu providing sanctuary for anarchists and socialists.

81Dilara86
Bewerkt: feb 4, 2019, 10:13 am

>77 LolaWalser: >78 lriley: >79 thorold: >80 lriley: Voyage en Italie sounds dire! And I was thinking of reading a couple of Gionos for this quarter... Having said that, I might still pick up The Horseman on the Roof/Le hussard sur le toit. I did find Hill/Colline and Un roi sans divertissement moving. The Man Who Planted Trees might not be the best example of Giono's work. It's a lot more preachy and optimistic that what he usually writes... And of course, he gave away his rights to it so that it could be freely distributed because he wrote this short story as a kind of ecological pamphlet, to encourage tree planting. (Like a true Provençal - think Marcel Pagnol-, making sure that nature thrives and springs don't run dry is almost an obsession.

82LolaWalser
Bewerkt: feb 4, 2019, 9:40 am

It's good to be reminded that Provence doesn't reduce to the Côte d'Azur. I've seen but not read the tree book. Giono was recommended to me ages ago when I was in withdrawal from Colette as someone similarly, or rather also sensitive to the natural world (they still manage to be planets apart, and if in doubt, go with Colette).

He is a hinterlander, closed in on his world. Not for him the open horizons... He had a radical grandpa but wasn't much of a leftist and emerged from the WWII compromised by his enthusiasm for Vichy and contacts with the Germans. He was also, apparently, a tremendous liar (how fitting for a friend of Gide's), as I recall from some curious reviews of his bio.

>81 Dilara86:

Hmm, I had no intention of leaving the impression that the book is "dire". I read it with great interest, considerable amusement, and some admiration.

83Dilara86
feb 4, 2019, 10:23 am

>81 Dilara86: Yes, "dire" wasn't the right word. Let's say that given the description, I feel that *I* wouldn't enjoy this book much. It sounded far too grumpy and contrary...

84lriley
feb 4, 2019, 10:40 am

I had a great uncle that my grandfather on my mother's side use to bring around every once in a while. He was gassed in WWI and afterwards spent the rest of his life in an asylum. Occasionally my great uncle was allowed out to make day trips but he had to literally to be back by sundown. He would have hallucinatory meltdowns after dark. People who go to war are almost always damaged by it in one way or another. My dad who fought in the Pacific theatre in WWII was damaged too. He was shot a couple times and I'm pretty certain he had PTSD. Giono's books that are about or reference his WWI experiences IMO are the works of a damaged person but it's also true he does see the world through a narrow lens that is closed pretty much on that Provencal region he grew up in. When choosing between mountains and coastlines I always opt for the coastline. If I were to make a trip to the Mediterranean region (and I would like to some day) I would be following the coast. I wouldn't be up in the hills.

The Aub book was very very good. It finishes up in Barcelona on the first day of the Civil War. Excellent street scenes of that.

85LolaWalser
Bewerkt: feb 4, 2019, 2:59 pm

(Apologies for the length! TL;DR: CLICK TO SKIP THIS POST)

Two more Moroccan books. Nouvelles du Maroc collects six novellas, by Mohamed Leftah, Abdellah Taïa, Karim Boukhari, Fadwa Islah, Abdelaziz Errachidi and Zineb El Rhazoui. Errachidi's Douleurs de sable ("Sorrows of the sand") seems the most "fictional", the most "literary"--in truth I don't know how best to describe its distinction. It may be easier to say what the opposite is like, and that's a largely documentary, autobiographical sound and topics, as if "write what you know" has been taken in the most literal way possible. It's worth noting because the more literature of this origin (immigrant and/or "post-colonial") I read, the more glaring it becomes how frequent is this autobiographical approach.

Leftah seems to be getting (posthumously) a lot of recognition and I'll be looking for his other work, although the story in this volume strikes me as unexceptional. A professor of classical Arabic literature (which, as in the West regarding classical education in general, used to connote more than teaching "just" literature but inculcating a larger set of values and way of thinking and living) is preparing a lecture on the 8th century poet Abu Nuwas, "the first modern", and glumly anticipating rejection and possibly worse from his increasingly fundamentalist students. His only consolation against the onslaught of "barbarians" is in the poetry itself.

Taïa writes about himself directly, relating how he watched a Patrice Chéreau movie about a gay man with equal desire and anxiety because his recently widowed mother, ignorant of his orientation, slumbered nearby.

Karim Boukhari, journalist and editor of a magazine with a modern outlook, writes about a Moroccan editor who takes cocaine and hate-fucks his French girlfriend, as a way of fucking France and History.

Elle me dit: "C'est bon, si booooon" avec un accent parisien si rare, si beau, j'ai l'impression que c'est la France entière qui est à mes genoux, qui me supplie et qui me suce. Oui, je baise la France, je suis en elle, je veux être en elle, je veux l'enfourcher et je veux qu'elle le sache. J'ai l'impression que c'est toute l'Histoire, la grande, qui vient à moi, et qui s'offre à moi. Je baise Nicolette et c'est comme si je baisais toute l'Histoire, mon histoire, la grande histoire.

(She tells me: "It's good, so goooood" with a Parisian accent so special, so beautiful, that I have the impression it's all of France at my feet begging me and sucking me. Yes, I fuck France, I'm inside her, I want to be inside her, I want to ride her and I want her to know it. I have the impression that it's all of History, the great one, that comes to me, and offers itself to me. I fuck Nicolette and it's as if I fucked all of History, my history, the great history.)


The whole story is monotonously in this vein and ends with discarding the "girlfriend" after raping her anally. ("Je l'ai sodomisé pour lui prendre quelque chose et garder quelque chose pour moi." I sodomised her in order to take something from her and to keep something for myself.) At first I thought Boukhari was sending up the brutal macho who "reads more often comics than the Qur'an" but by the end I wasn't so sure. I'm also not sure it's good to have ambiguity in such matters. In any case I'm getting weary of the whole motif of taking out frustrations and avenging historical injustices on women. The obsession with blondes and blonde "whores" and blonde European "whores" can also go take a hike, I don't care how "ironic" it is or isn't meant to be or who entertains it.

In Fadwa Islah's story, Demain j'avorte ("Tomorrow I'm having an abortion"), a married imam's girlfriend discovers she's pregnant. The lightning-quick switch from abject sexual besottedness to complete disillusionment (which results in the decision to abort) isn't believable in the least--in one paragraph this sexually "liberated" woman is ready even to become a second wife just so she could "belong" to the lover officially, then a sermon all of a sudden reveals the imam as a fundamentalist and she's repelled for good. Of course, Islah's message doesn't depend on verisimilitude, and I guess it's all about the message...

El Rhazoui's story impressed me as the most "politically conscious" of the pieces in both books, actually the only one to speak directly about Morocco's political situation. It gives an excellent and harrowing description of a protest during those Arab "spring revolutions" where progressive groups face off combined forces of government thugs and rabble bought cheaply to beat and intimidate. I appreciated the opportunity to overhear Moroccans talking to Moroccans and not to the more or less abstract, vague and distant European.

This aspect is also what makes the second book, Lettres à un jeune marocain (Letters to a young Moroccan), especially interesting. Published in France but intended (according to one contributor) primarily for distribution in Morocco, it would be less of a formal exercise than similar books that have been published in English, have some real urgency and point. Of course, the audience is limited to some definition of "educated" and probably middle class or higher--Morocco's total literacy rate in 2012 was 67%--under 60% for women--and it's not clear how many are francophone. Youth literacy rates are higher but boys are still ahead of girls by good ten points.

I found the book interesting already simply for what it is and would be in almost any selection but I must say I think the editor, Abdellah Taïa, profoundly failed in at least one important aspect--and that is regarding gender and women. To begin with something that could have been the strongest and yet simplest way of signalling support for women, equal representation. Out of eighteen contributors (himself included), only five are women. Why? There's no excuse possible regarding profession, age, literary reputation--most of these people aren't writers in the sense of authors who live by publishing books, but journalists and free lancers, most are not well or at all known, quite a few are very young (e.g. a 20 year old student of technology). There's no way that there don't exist sufficient number of Moroccan women who could have turned in pieces at least not less adequate than the majority of what he selected from men.

Moreover, in French the title is already sexist (French being more strongly gendered than, say, English, where "Letters to a young Moroccan" allows a more neutral reading), setting up expectations of who the letters are for. Indeed, only four contributors, two men and two women, choose to address their "letter" to a female reader, and only one (a woman) addresses both genders. With the imbalance in the gender of the contributors, that's a strong suggestion of sexism with minimum effort--which could just as easily have been mitigated. No fuss and speechifying necessary, just give women damn equal space for once.

And then comes the content of the choices... Taïa's first selection of a piece by a woman, if you read in order, is Fadwa Islah's lament about NOT getting sexually harassed on the streets of Paris, her looks (she says) not being to the taste of, implicitly, white Frenchmen ("only Africans and Arabs think I'm attractive") and how much she now regrets getting angry at the catcallers etc. back home in Morocco. They used to frustrate her to the bone, but now she thinks she didn't understand them--worse, didn't appreciate them. Next follows sexual folklore tripe about Moroccan women and their special hotness and appetites and lots of banal "be yourself" advice.

I read this piece before the one in Nouvelles du Maroc with final impression that Islah is a dumbass. After the other one I hoped she was a comedian. And yet, it's the same voice, suggesting it's legitimately her voice. Looking around for more of her work online, trying to understand what she's saying and why, wasn't very successful. I came across this piece by Taïa (obviously they are best buddies), Le corps de Fadwa and, probably a great reference but at 279 pages currently too long to read, a PhD thesis which mentions her, among many others: An other-thought of the body: sex and sexuality in contemporary Moroccan fiction. (In French.)

In short, there might be more to discuss on the function of the theme of sex and in particular of Islah's type of riotously explicit, sexually cock-mad, bitch-in-heat message in the context of Moroccan/Muslim puritanism and repression. I can only say I'm saddened that this superficial boldness is no less anchored to a vision of women's worth as primarily that of a sex object and the goal of finding "the man of {one}'s life" to whom one sacrifices everything. It's as if she won a freedom of expression--but without real liberty. The notions of love and gender are at the core still those of her grandmothers.

Sanaa Elaji's letter is also addressed to a girl and seems to start strong ("revolt, resist the patriarchal scheme, kill the father, as philosophers say...") but then, stupefyingly, continues into a specially titled chapter "No to equality" (Non à l'égalité).



Non à l'égalité

Ne perds pas ton temps à courrir derrière ce mirage qu'est l'égalité entre l'homme et la femme. Ça, ce sont de vielles lunes. Ne cherche pas à être l'égale de l'homme mais à être toi-même. Ne revendique pas tes droits en tant que femme, mais vis-les directment. Vis ta féminité, vis ta liberté et vis ta beauté avec toute la vitalité dont tu es capable. Vis tes droits plutot que de les réclamer. (...) Sois resplendissante afin d'etre heureuse. (...)

(Don't waste your time running after the mirage of equality between man and woman. That's old hat. Don't seek to be equal to a man but to be yourself. Don't demand your rights as a woman, but live them directly. Live your femininity, live your freedom and live your beauty with all the vitality you can muster. Live your rights rather than claim them. (...) Be dazzling in order to be happy.) (...)


Maybe I'm blind, being a privileged European and all, but this is some of the most frightful, useless and toxic bullshit I've come across. The criticisms seem so obvious they must be superfluous.

With the inclusion of texts such as Islah's and Elaji's, one wonders what mere gender parity matters anyway. But I'd hope they'd at least be more obviously in a minority. (I don't think El Rhazoui or Slimani, for instance, would fall on that side.)

I focus on this aspect of the collection because women's rights are fundamental to lasting social revolution and change. It's a shame that that issue is largely neglected here, and it's a scandal what dominant spin the editor's choice put on it. No, it's not enough that women write freely what a big cock the man "of their life" has, nor is "be yourself" and "be dazzling" intelligible enough a way to equal treatment, opportunity, pay, status.

I realise that as an outsider I can't know what and how would impress a "young Moroccan". What seems reactionary or insufficient to me may yet be inspiring in some progressive way to someone else (I suppose or at least, hope). Trying to imagine myself in the position of a young person growing in a poor ex-colony, awed by and resentful of the ex-colonist's culture and desirous of those riches and freedoms (almost all letters seem to address a future or wannabe emigrant), the most "useful" or telling pieces, spurring thought, seem to me to be by Rachid Benzine on non-literal reading of the Qur'an, Omar Berrada's discussion of language and identity (addressed to his multi-ethnic polyglot daughter) and Abdelhak Serhane's bitter, short farce on government, describing both the reasons for escape and why escape, in the end, may be impossible.

86LolaWalser
feb 4, 2019, 2:48 pm

>84 lriley:

Good to hear that about Aub. PTSD is an interesting topic. I would like to know whether, as seems to be the case to me, it is less prevalent in people who are fighting for a good cause (defensive warfare). Not having been busy comitting atrocities against civillians also seems to be a counter-indicator for PTSD.

>83 Dilara86:

Ha, a dose of contrariness is spice and salt to me. :) But I don't think you have to fear that here, he's no Mrs. Victorian Grumpypants (The clumsiest people in Europe).

87cindydavid4
feb 4, 2019, 7:36 pm

>84 lriley: . Not having been busy comitting atrocities against civillians also seems to be a counter-indicator for PTSD.

Unfortunately that is not always the case. My nephew was with the coast guard for 5 years. We know he was not involved in fighting, but still came back a changed man with a drinking problem. Ended up killing himsel at the age of 30 after causing injury in a DUI. His mom tried to get him help, but there wasn't much available and he wsn't interested anyway.

88cindydavid4
feb 4, 2019, 7:37 pm

BTW Ive been fascinated with this discussion - was not at al what I expected; lots of fascinating new (to me) authors and titles and topics. Thanks for this!

89LolaWalser
feb 4, 2019, 9:44 pm

>87 cindydavid4:

I'm very sorry to hear that about your nephew. There's no point in applying generalities to specific cases, it's utterly impossible to assess all the factors involved with any individual.

90lriley
feb 4, 2019, 10:26 pm

#86--I think there would be a better chance of avoiding PTSD in a defensive war by which I think you mean just defending your homeland like the Vietnamese or Iraqi's.

#87--the Pacific War in WWII was a war of one atrocity after another. MacArthur's strategy wasn't to hit every island that the Japanese controlled but select ones and often the target were islands that they decided would have good air strips. And the Japanese often fought to practically the last man--they were dug in with networks of bunkers--they would torture and mutilate prisoners and that turns into a quid pro quo. It ends with our major atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Anyway I was in the Coast Guard between 1981 and 1985. I'm sorry to hear about your nephew.

91LolaWalser
feb 4, 2019, 10:46 pm

>90 lriley:

I think there would be a better chance of avoiding PTSD in a defensive war by which I think you mean just defending your homeland like the Vietnamese or Iraqi's.

Right. It's hard to see how that sort of motivation might not prevail over the type of wars waged by the US since the WWII (and a good deal of those before).

92cindydavid4
Bewerkt: feb 4, 2019, 10:55 pm

>89 LolaWalser:,>90 lriley: thank you for your kindness. He had been in the CG for 5 years, and was so happy there, and excited about a new stage in his lilfe when he left. But something happened somewhere to cause such a change. Not sure we will ever know.

93rocketjk
feb 4, 2019, 11:14 pm

>91 LolaWalser: & >92 cindydavid4:

I think there would be a better chance of avoiding PTSD in a defensive war by which I think you mean just defending your homeland like the Vietnamese or Iraqi's.

Right. It's hard to see how that sort of motivation might not prevail over the type of wars waged by the US since the WWII (and a good deal of those before).


I'm not sure if that's how PTSD works. I think if you were, say, exposed to long hours of shelling, and/or seeing your friends killed all around you week after week, it wouldn't really matter why you had been put in that situation in terms of the effect those experiences might have on you long-term. Conjecture only, though. I'm far from an expert on the subject.

94LolaWalser
Bewerkt: feb 4, 2019, 11:46 pm

>93 rocketjk:

I meant (in apparently too ironically understated a manner) that not committing a massacre would seem to be a bare minimum for not developing PTSD, not that that would suffice to prevent it from all the myriad ways warfare, especially modern, can cause it.

ETA: (Analogy: there are many ways to die crossing a street and no absolute guarantees you won't die no matter how you go about it. But not stepping right into the stream of moving vehicles regardless of position and signals would be one of the "bare minimum" things you might do to try to avoid death.)

95thorold
feb 5, 2019, 10:36 am

>86 LolaWalser: - >94 LolaWalser: - interesting. Tempted to comment, but I don't actually know anything about the subject either, so I'll delete what I was going to say and talk about books instead ...

---

Scenes from village life (>27 thorold: above) and the reactions to my review of that - in particular the radio interviews linked by >31 rocketjk: - made me want to read more by Oz, especially this one, which I've been taking slowly over the last week or so.

By pure accident, it turned out to be an interesting complement to El balcón en invierno - both memoirs in which the authors deal with the suicide of a parent, one by someone who's coming to literature from a non-literate, peasant world; the other from someone who discovers a resolution in writing fiction in the course of his attempt to get away from his over-scholarly family of prominent intellectuals and discover the sunburnt pioneer he hopes is lurking inside him...

Interesting to see that Oz cites Winesburg, Ohio as the book that gave him a model for the sort of writer he aspired to be - that obviously resonates very strongly with Scenes from village life.

A tale of love and darkness (2002) by Amos Oz (Israel, 1939-2018)

  

Oz writes about his parents, their background in Russia and how they came to Palestine in the thirties; about his childhood in a suburb of Jerusalem, the creation of the state of Israel and the war of 1948; about his mother's illness and death, and his decision to leave home in his early teens and move to a kibbutz, and - indirectly - about how all that shaped the kind of writer he became.

This is already a fascinating story from the purely historical point of view - I knew very little about Israel, and most of what I've read about the Jewish experience in the 20th century has been by people who either experienced the Nazi terror at first hand or who emigrated to Britain or the US. So it was very interesting to read about the Zionist movement in the early 20th century, Tarbut schools, the politics surrounding the creation of the new state, and all the rest. And particularly about the role played by the reinvention of Hebrew as a modern language. It's not many writers who get to work in a language on which the ink is still wet - Oz records that his father's uncle, Joseph Klausner, was responsible for devising the Hebrew words for such basic concepts as "shirt", "pencil" and "rhinoceros". Oz himself was brought up speaking only Hebrew, but his parents and most of their neighbours still used Russian, Yiddish, and various other European languages between themselves, especially when something had to be said that wasn't for the boy's ears.

The way emigration to Palestine worked also meant that Oz grew up in a very odd social environment in which almost every adult in the very poor neighbourhood where they lived seemed to be a poet, scholar, physician or politician of some kind. His father was a literary scholar, working as an academic librarian since there weren't enough students to provide employment for more than a small fraction of the teachers. One of young Amos's early memories is of being told off very firmly for arranging his little collection of picture books on the shelf by size. We don't do that sort of thing in this house!

Then there's the whole theme of the cultures that are competing to define the new nation - all the different permutations of secular humanism versus orthodox Judaism, suits and ties vs. suntans and shorts, Tel Aviv vs. Jerusalem, shtetl vs. kibbutz, left vs. right, peaceful coexistence vs. permanent war, one state vs. two, and so on - none of them a straightforward choice.

But even if you start reading this book for its subject-matter, you will probably go on because of Oz's extraordinary skill as a storyteller. Every little anecdote is a joy in itself, but it also draws you in further along the carefully constructed path of the story, bringing you towards the narrative crux, the key event in his childhood, his mother's death. But not actually reaching it until the very end of the book - each time the story approaches this key moment, it swerves off in a different direction, and these moments of not telling turn out to be some of the most expressive in the book. Very moving.

I was also struck by the ease with which Oz switches between the narrative voice of the observant child and that of the analytical adult, which is often something that gives memoirs an awkwardly disjointed feel - most writers are much better at one than the other. Here we hardly notice the joins, as he tells us about what he remembers seeing and hearing, then moves on seamlessly to reflect with hindsight on the wider context. He even manages to do this convincingly in the secondhand account of his mother's childhood in Rovno, as told him many years afterwards by her sister.

I was hoping that I could say that I've done Oz by reading this one, but it looks as though I'll have to go on...

96thorold
feb 5, 2019, 10:55 am

I watched Ruth Beckermann's film Those who go Those who stay (2013) last night. It sounded as though it would be very relevant to this topic - "... takes us on a journey through the identity of a ceaselessly displaced Europe and Mediterranea..." - but it was so obstinately non-narrative that I'm not really sure any more what I saw. But there were definitely bits in it about migration (Jews leaving Europe for Palestine, Africans arriving in Lampedusa, Austrians being unpleasant in FPÖ hats in Vienna). And some very beautiful shots of ladies crossing a road in Alexandria and little girls playing minigolf that didn't seem to have anything to do with anything. And a Frenchman smoking in a library and a security consultant showing off a robot camera. It seemed to be something like the cinema counterpart of a found poem.

Worth watching, maybe, but you probably won't learn anything from it. Except possibly that if you're a terrorist and you see someone throw a rubber ball in through the window, it would be wise to throw it back.

97lriley
feb 5, 2019, 11:41 am

Two Lebanese writers--both IMO are excellent.

Etel Adnan--Sitt Marie Rose and Elias Khoury--Gate of the Sun--both of those books are awesome.

98rocketjk
Bewerkt: feb 5, 2019, 12:52 pm

The mentions of Amos Oz this morning put me in mind of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Here's one of my favorites of his (if this is inappropriate to post at length due to copyright considerations, let me know and I will remove it quickly).

On Some Other Planet You May Be Right

"On some other planet you may be right,
but not here." While you were talking
you changed to a silent weeping, as in the middle of a letter
you change, when your pen goes dry, from blue to black,
or as people used to switch horses during a journey.
Talk grew tired, tears
are always fresh.

Seeds of summer flew into the room
we were sitting in. In front of the window
there was an almond tree growing black:
one more warrior in the eternal battle
of the sweet against the bitter.

Look, just as time isn't inside clocks,
love isn't inside bodies:
bodies only show love.

But let's remember this evening
the way people remember the motions of swimming
from one summer to the next. "On some other planet
you may be right, but not here."

Also, coincidentally, the first poem on this page of Amichai poems and quotes is another favorite of mine. The title's not included for some reason, but it's "A Man Doesn't Have Time."

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/60905.Yehuda_Amichai

99Dilara86
Bewerkt: feb 6, 2019, 11:28 am

>98 rocketjk: Thank you for this recommendation!

>27 thorold: I've just started Scenes from Village Life. So far so good!

ETA: What a coincidence: Yehuda Amichai is mentioned in Scenes from Village Life!

100lriley
feb 6, 2019, 12:48 pm

Just starting a book by Pablo Martin Sanchez--The Anarchist who shared my name. He is from Reus in Catalonia. He is also the first Spanish member of Oulipo--a group or literature society first founded by the French writer Raymond Queneau and French mathematician Francois Li Lionnais in the 1950's. Other members of Oulipo include Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. In the prologue introducing his book Martin Sanchez talks about googling his own name and running across someone with his name who was exiled in France during the 1920's--so he decided to research this person with the idea of writing a novel about him. That took some real work but eventually he found out that that Martin Sanchez had had a niece who was still alive and living in a nursing home in Durango. That led to numerous interviews and stories provided which were used to draw together a novel about Spanish anarchists and leftists exiled in France during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in the 1920's. Or at least that is how it begins.

101thorold
feb 7, 2019, 5:09 am

>100 lriley: Sounds interesting! I was going to moan at you for posting that just after I've been to the library, but as it happens they haven't got any of his books anyway :-(

---

North Africa again: This is one that was recommended to me by a number of people last year - as it turned out I read another of Chraïbi's books first, Une enquête au pays, a kind of witty north-African subversion of the crime-story. This one is also witty and north African, but quite different otherwise...

La Civilisation, ma Mère !... (1972; Mother comes of age) by Driss Chraïbi (Morocco, 1926-2007)

  

In 1930s Casablanca, two teenage boys decide to treat their mother to new shoes and a dress and take her out to the park for the afternoon. They have no idea what far-reaching consequences this simple act of kindness is going to have...

Chraïbi wittily and sensitively charts the process through which a woman who's been locked up in domestic servitude for the first 35 years of her life discovers the world she's been excluded from and embraces it with both hands. At first we see her needlessly reinventing basic technologies for herself, or ludicrously misunderstanding the modern world (putting the electric iron on the stove to heat up, saying goodnight to the magic voice in the radio...), but it's not long before she has taken control of her own life and is having a good go at making the world a better place for other women in her situation, and knocking on De Gaulle's door to try to convince him of the need for a new future for colonial countries in the post-war world.

Of course, Chraïbi might be treading on tricky ground by writing a feminist book from a male point of view, but he's obviously well aware of this and makes sure we get to see through the patronising assumptions of his male narrators as quickly as Mother does. There's a telling scene where the teacher in whose class Mother is preparing to take the Baccalaureate comes to see the narrator-son and complains to him that she's undermining his authority by questioning the flaws and inconsistencies in what he teaches. The son has no helpful advice to offer, other than that he could try the traditional teacher's response, sarcasm...

Entertaining and heart-warming, and a well-meant reminder of the way patriarchy habitually and needlessly wastes the contribution that women should be making to society, but maybe all a little bit too rosy-eyed: Mother is able to escape from her kitchen only thanks to the assistance of enlightened (or simply reckless!) men, and once out she encounters only token resistance. This is more of a manifesto than a guide to practical revolution.

102LolaWalser
feb 7, 2019, 3:57 pm

The mum was such a beautiful character.

103thorold
feb 7, 2019, 5:53 pm

You can’t help wondering how much of that was the author’s mother ... some bits of it made me think of my grandmother, too.

It didn’t occur to me until after I’d finished the book that only one character has a name - the brother who narrates the second part. I wonder why that was?

104lriley
feb 7, 2019, 6:35 pm

#101--decided to give that one a shot too. I ordered it today.

105librorumamans
feb 12, 2019, 11:52 pm

>86 LolaWalser:

OTOH, I understand that there's a significant incidence of PTSD among paramedics and firefighters.

106librorumamans
feb 13, 2019, 12:01 am

>5 LolaWalser:

I snagged one of the two circulating copies of The Spirit of Mediterranean Places. Wow. Thank you!

Butor's gift for spinning sentences of (almost) endless beauty astonishes me, même en anglais.

107LolaWalser
feb 13, 2019, 12:44 pm

>105 librorumamans:

Oh, I wouldn't say there's anything "otoh" about it--it's just that I was talking about the fighters, soldiers... active participants and perpetrators of violence. Obviously the victims and various kinds of "bystanders" get affected too.

>106 librorumamans:

Probably a good portion of praise goes to Lydia Davis. Terrific translator.

108LolaWalser
Bewerkt: feb 14, 2019, 5:47 pm

I read another book by Taïa, Le jour du roi, and started on yet another one, but got tired of him all of a sudden. His style, which I told Mark I hadn't noticed particularly before ("The Salvation Army" was, I think, one of his first novels and perhaps less marked by it) became unbearable after several books in a row. All choppy little sentences and repetition of single phrases and words ("C'est fini. C'est fini. C'est fini." "Maintenant. Maintenant. Maintenant." etc.), cheap schoolkid trick to signal "emotion" when all it does is irritate. In short, best in small doses.

Le jour du roi (Day of the King) pits the poor gay boy against his frenemy the rich gayish boy. The style is "poetic", with more suggested than said, but there's a curious appendix regarding a minor character, one of the rich boy's black servants, which left me very intrigued to learn more about the relationship of black Africans and Arab Moroccans. It doesn't seem to be a topic much written about, and Taïa again deserves recognition for venturing, however shyly, into what I suspect is some very difficult and unpleasant territory.

I was unexpectedly reminded of this as I read Edith Wharton's In Morocco, originally published in 1920. It may be the first guidebook to Morocco in English; at least, Wharton was very aware that she was unusually privileged in 1919, passing through a country on the brink of succumbing to mass tourism. She even reported on the road networks being built by the French (Morocco at the time was their protectorate) and assessed them in her capacity of a motor fiend (see Henry James' stricken accounts of tooling with her in her car down the Riviera...)

Most of the book are descriptions (quite beautiful) of places. She is flattering to the French, but after all they were her hosts and enabled her travel, so I don't know how much of that is politeness or real conviction. During the war the preponderant question had been whether France or Germany would prevail in North Africa, nobody gave a thought to something like "native" independence. There'd be some strongman somewhere and you made treaties with him, or threats to him. Whoever he led and whatever territory he laid claim to was a "country" or maybe not. Depending on various interests, but least of all "the will of the people".

She mentions a visit to a Jewish quarter, in Fez, which she says is typical, and that's where I had my first shock--in 1919 that was still a classic ghetto locked up every night, as in medieval Europe, with no Jews allowed out or circulating in other parts of town. Plus a myriad other restrictions and humiliations, and a picture of devastating poverty. I suppose I thought naively the French would have removed such rules... although Wharton writes they aimed, after Lyautey became the resident-general, to interfere with local "customs" as little as possible. (Algeria was a somewhat different story.)

Recently I read some brave youngish Moroccan intellectual saying he wishes for the one million (his number) Amazigh-speaking Jews to return to Morocco (from Israel). That would be an interesting dialogue to follow...

Wharton visited with the women where she was allowed, all from the upper class, sequestered in harems and with less physical freedom than their servants and slaves. It's a dismal picture and unfortunately it was still something you'd experience almost seventy years later.

The Moroccan lady knows little of cooking, needlework, or any household arts. When her child is ill she can only hang it with amulets and wail over it; the great lady of the Fazi palace is as ignorant of hygiene as the peasant woman of the bled. And all these colourless eventless lives depend on the favour of one fat tyrannical man, bloated with good living and authority, himself almost as inert and sedentary as his women, and accustomed to impose his whims on them ever since he ran about the same patio as a little short-smocked boy. {Oh what memories of a nasty little brute who terrorised his sisters and anyone woman-shaped this brought back...} (...) Ignorance, unhealthiness and a precocious sexual initiation prevail in all classes. Education consists in learning by heart endless passages of the Koran, and amusement in assisting at spectacles that would be unintelligible to Western children, but that the pleasantries of the harem make perfectly comprehensible to Moroccan infancy. {Compare to Taïa's recurring theme of not only being privy to his parents' abundant and unconcealed lovemaking, but the routine sexual games with his siblings...} At eight or nine the little girls are married, at twelve the son of the house is 'given his first negress'; and thereafter, in the rich and leisured class, both sexes live till old age in an atmosphere of sensuality without seduction.


The entrapment of girls into sexual slavery is for me the worst possible aspect of any society. There is no clearer nor more brutal way of showing you think of women as cunts and wombs and things and ways to make men, and not as people. To take an eight year old, nine year old, or as I read not too long ago, in Afghanistan, a six year old, and "marry" her, leave her illiterate and ignorant, disenfranchised and producing babies from the moment the miserable little body can until it can't--there should be a special category for this kind of protracted, repeated, long and slow murder of body and soul.

And then the other slavery, of people one does not "marry"... this was the second shock, that in 1919, "under Western eyes", there were still slaves in all the "good" Moroccan homes, formal slaves, people formally owned by others, like kitchen appliances and foodstuff and donkeys...

While tea was being served I noticed a tiny negress, not more than six or seven years old, who stood motionless in the embrasure of an archway. Like most of Moroccan slaves, even in the greatest households, she was shabbily, almost raggedly, dressed. A dirty gandarah of striped muslin covered her faded caftan, and a cheap kerchief was wound above her grave and precocious little face. With preternatural vigilance she watched each movement of the Caïd, who never spoke to her, looked at her, or made her the slightest perceptible sign, but whose least wish she instantly divined, refilling his tea-cup, passing the plates of sweets, or removing our empty glasses, in obedience to some secret telegraphy on which her whole being hung. (...)
The Caïd's little black slaves are well known in Morocco...(...)


In retrospect this intensified the shock of Taïa's story about the black servant, whom he calls a servant but who, as I understand now, is a slave treated like a slave--in 1990s Morocco.

109thorold
Bewerkt: feb 17, 2019, 4:42 pm

>108 LolaWalser: The Taïa book I read also brought in the theme of discrimination against black North Africans by Arabs, and I’ve seen it as a key part of the plot somewhere else as well - I think it must have been in either Une enquête au pays or Meursault, contre-enquête. Some book with “enquête” in the title, anyway...

ETA: no it wasn’t, see >117 thorold:

110LolaWalser
feb 14, 2019, 6:22 pm

Hmm, I read Daoud's book but I don't recall that theme... Anyway, I think I'm moving on to Algeria next. I'll be keeping this topic in mind as of special interest.

111Dilara86
Bewerkt: feb 18, 2019, 5:37 am

If you're interested in the topic of Black North Africans, Kateb Yacine was one of the first to speak about the need for North Africans to embrace their (subsaharan) African roots and to acknowledge the fact that Algerian society is multiracial, and that its culture is African. Typically, I can't find much about it right now... There's this: http://africultures.com/kateb-yacine-et-lafrique-morceaux-choisis-576/ I'm pretty sure I've seen an INA video of him talking about it. I'll have a look again when I've had my coffee.
And of course, his son, Amazigh Kateb is a gnawa musician and is vocal about it.

ETA: Now I remember. I read about this in a special edition of Revue Europe dedicated to Kateb Yacine (Kateb Yacine, Europe numéro 828).

112Dilara86
feb 15, 2019, 8:14 am

Murale (Mural) by Mahmoud Darwich, translated by Elias Sanbar





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Palestinian
Original language: Arabic
Translated into: French
Location: mostly N/A, also the Near-East


Darwish’s poetry is lyrical, evocative and very accessible.

113Dilara86
feb 15, 2019, 9:51 am

Métisse palissade by Eugène Ébodé





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Born in Cameroon, lives in France – no idea what passport(s) he has
Original language: France
Translated into: N/A
Location: a house somewhere between Aix-en-Provence and Gardanne, Nîmes (France), Algiers (Algeria)


I chose this book because it takes place on both sides of the Mediterranean: in Algeria (mainly Algiers), Roussillon and Provence. Our narrator, a young doctor whose father is Cameroonian and a writer and whose mother is white, French and Provençale, dissects his parent’s marriage and divorce, his father’s philandering and his father’s subsequent disappearance. It’s pretty clear the Cameroonian Don Juan father is a version of Ébodé himself. The book is quite self-indulgent and inobservant. Dialogues are overwritten and unrealistic. No suspension of disbelief for me.

114thorold
feb 16, 2019, 7:19 am

Albania, again, and a sort of love story for sort-of St Valentine's Day:

The accident (2008; English 2011) by Ismail Kadare (Albania, 1936- ), translated by John Hodgson

  

A taxi goes off the road near Vienna airport, and the passengers, a man and woman, both Albanians, are killed. It looks like a tragic but banal road accident, but the file stays open, since on the one hand the Serbian and Albanian secret services are taking an interest - the man was a senior official of the Council of Europe - and on the other hand two friends have reported that the woman had told them she was afraid that the man, her lover, was about to murder her.

As we dig deeper and deeper into the couple's back-story, we never seem to get any nearer to a coherent explanation of the facts. It is almost as though some novelist might be using them to make a satirical point about Albanian history: if intimate relationships reflect the societies they come out of, then a relationship between two modern Albanians must be grounded in abuse of power, weapons, role-playing, suspicion, betrayal (real, pretended, imagined), jealousy, historical guilt, atavistic fear of "The Hague", galloping horses, and a non-realist narrative logic derived from old ballads.

I'm not sure about this book: Kadare is very good at what he does, and the way the story slides between factual crime-story, psychological reconstruction and bizarre magic-realism is very clever. However, the mix of politics and transgressive clandestine sex often makes you feel you're back in the bad old macho days of Milan Kundera, and then there's the narrator's curious obsession with lesbians... It's all presented ironically and critically from the woman's point-of-view, but I was left feeling that the irony was a bit half-hearted, and the voyeurism was what the author was really counting on to sell the book.

115Dilara86
feb 16, 2019, 11:55 am

>114 thorold: Shame about the Kadare...

Poursuites by Andrée Chedid, illustrated by Xavier





Writer’s gender: Female
Writer’s nationality: French (born in Egypt, Lebanese-Syrian Maronite ancestry)
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: N/A
First published in 2003


Andrée Chedid was born in Egypt of Lebanese and Syrian parents. For some reason, I thought her family was Sephardic, but they’re not: they’re Maronite Christians. She and her husband moved to France after the war and became French citizens. Outside of poetry anthologies, this is the first time I’ve read one of her works since being traumatised by The Sixth Day as a child. I could not understand why a book as anxiety-inducing as this one could exist – or be made available to children... Someone – not me – actually tagged it “Depressing” on LT! I should really read it again: I’m pretty sure I’d like it now – or at least appreciate it more.
Anyway. Poursuites is a book of short and deceptively simple poems illustrated in black and white by an artist called Xavier who I couldn’t find anything about. The drawings didn’t do anything for me, but I liked the poems.

116thorold
Bewerkt: feb 17, 2019, 7:44 am

>8 LolaWalser: >106 librorumamans:

Of course, I had to try Butor as well. Our normally excellent city library doesn't have anything by him in the catalogue, but it occurred to me (eventually) to try ebooks. Not much to add to what both of you already said, but my thoughts are below.

BTW: is the short French book I read (ending with "Egypt") the same as the English one you read, or did yours contain later pieces as well? I wasn't sure whether to combine them or not.

Le génie du lieu (1958; The spirit of Mediterranean places) by Michel Butor (France, 1926-2016)

  

This was the first of five books Butor published under this general title, and includes short pieces on Cordoba, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Delphi, Ferrara and Mantua, as well as a much longer piece based on Butor's time working as a teacher in a small town in Egypt. They aren't really "travel pieces" or "essays" in the conventional sense: Butor is trying to find a new way to knit together his subjective impressions of a place with more objective observation and with cultural and historical background material, without allowing any of these separate threads to have more weight than the others. He does this partly by shuffling around the order in which he presents different classes of ideas to us, but he's also relying on some odd grammatical tricks. He uses conjunctions and demonstratives in places where we don't expect them, and instead of the conventional hierarchy of paragraphs, sentences and clauses, he is trying out a new way of writing based on long sentences split up into paragraph-length clauses.

Except that this last bit isn't really new - after a few pages I realised where I'd seen this structure before: it's exactly the way that the preambles of documents like international treaties are written (in French, at least; in English drafters tend to rely on the deadly word "whereas" to start each clause). Possibly just the effect of déformation professionelle in my case, but after the penny dropped it was difficult to look at Butor's "comma, new paragraph" jumps without thinking of contracting states meeting in diplomatic conference...

That silly quibble apart, Butor's prose is seductive, and it's sometimes hard to avoid reading it for its sound rather than its sense. But it is worth trying to do both: he has a lot of interesting things to say about places and how they reflect the different stages in their history, and how important it is to see history in a holistic, continuous and local way, not as a bunch of irreconcilable "periods" invented by historians from elsewhere. Especially in the Egyptian piece, he is concerned about the way the education system tries to impose a Eurocentric view of the past that doesn't at all reflect the experience of the ordinary people living there. It's also telling, in this context, that he chose to follow the Cordoba piece, in which he reminds us how the beauty of the city's Islamic architecture barely managed to survive attempts to Christianise it, with the Istanbul piece, where things are of course precisely the other way round. The Delphi piece is also interesting: Delphi would strike most people as a perfect example of a place which revolves completely around one tradition from one historical moment, but Butor takes the time to dig out traces of at least five previous cults which shaped the Apollo tradition. Obviously we should never take anything for granted.

117thorold
feb 17, 2019, 4:42 pm

>109 thorold: >110 LolaWalser:

I was wrong - it was Arab Jazz I was thinking of, as I was reminded by our book club this evening. Given how few North Africa-related books I’ve read lately, I’ve no excuse for mixing them all up in my mind.

The central character’s mother in Arab Jazz is an Arab Moroccan who gets into trouble for having a black boyfriend.

118Dilara86
Bewerkt: feb 19, 2019, 9:57 am

Contes populaires de Palestine by Praline Gay-Para





Writer’s gender:
Writer’s nationality: French (Lebanese origins)
Original language: Arabic, translated or adapted into French directly from the Arabic, or via a previous English translation
Translated into: French
Location: Palestine
First published in 2003


This short book contains sixteen Palestinian folktales from different sources, including Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, translated and/or retold by the wonderfully-named storyteller and ethnolinguist Praline Gay-Para. It was a pleasant read.
I found an interesting interview with Praline Gay-Para in French
« Pour préparer ma thèse de troisième cycle sur les contes libanais, j’ai voulu aller sur le terrain collecter des contes. C’était en pleine guerre, et comme j’étais bien jeune, je pensais que les gens n’avaient que cela à faire : me raconter des contes ! Mais ce n’était pas si évident et j’ai reçu alors la plus belle leçon de ma vie : pour avoir le droit d’écouter des histoires, il faut d’abord en raconter ! »

« Pour ce recueil, j’en ai exploité plusieurs. Je possédais déjà trois recueils édités en Égypte : des contes d’Irak, de Palestine et d’Égypte. J’ai également utilisé un ouvrage formidable issu d’un collectage et publié par des Américains sociologues d’origine palestinienne : Speak Birds, Speak Again. Ce livre est très intéressant parce qu’y figurent les villages où ils ont été recueillis, la date, l’identité des narrateurs enregistrés et, de plus, la traduction est très fidèle. J’ai aussi utilisé un autre recueil où figuraient des contes collectés à la radio dans les années 20 et la revue d’une ONG palestinienne basée à Beyrouth qui, à chaque numéro, publie un ou deux contes. Mais je n’utilise que des collectages et jamais de textes d’auteurs. »


ETA: the striking cover art is by Laila Shawa

119SassyLassy
feb 19, 2019, 11:14 am

While this group mainly reads fiction, I thought a little background might help me. This book had been on the TBR pile since 2010, so there didn't seem a more fitting time to read it finally.



Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Centre of the World by Roger Crowley
first published 2008

This is one of those books that once again made me seriously question how a particular school curriculum is chosen. Years of my schooling were spent on the history of Britain - read England. Scotland got mentions for Mary Stuart, the succession problem on the death of Elizabeth I, the Acts of Union and a few inventors from the Industrial Revolution. Ireland had a potato famine and King Billy (strong Orange overtones here). Wales was nonexistent.

As for the rest of the world, there were nods to ancient civilizations, there were great explorers, although only years later did I discover that John Cabot was really the Genoese Giovanni Caboto, also known as the Venetian Zuan Chabotto. There was a full year spent on the Renaissance and Reformation, always referred to as a pairing.

Then there was the triumvirate of "Greats": Peter, Catherine, and Frederick, and the revolutions in the Thirteen Colonies and France. Fast forward to the twentieth century and Sarajevo. Whole areas of the world, indeed whole continents, seemed nonexistent. Luckily, even in grade school I liked history and found my own books outside the classroom.

Rant over, what does all this have to do with the book in question? It shows the importance of perspective. In Empires of the Sea, Crowley's centre of the world is the Mediterranean Sea in the sixteenth century. This necessarily involves looking at those who lived on its circumference, and how they saw their world.

Basically, Crowley starts by putting the geographical focus on an east west axis, with a great power lodged at each end. The Hapsburgs led by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, sat at one end, with the massive Ottoman Empire led by Suleiman the Magnificent at the other. The straits between Tunis and Sicily formed a sort of natural dividing line between the spheres of influence. Not completely, however, for Crowley pays attention to the Barbary Coast, that shoreline of North Africa with the all important city of Tunis claimed by both powers.

The Mediterranean Sea was a dangerous place. Depending on weather, it could take two to six months to sail from Marseilles to Crete. There weren't just storms to worry about; pirates and slavers were everywhere. All in all, an odd place to choose as battle central, or as Crowley puts it, "...the epicentre of a world war". As he says
The struggle sucked in all the nations and special interest groups that bordered Mediterranean waters: Turks, Greeks, North Africans, Spaniards, Italians and Frenchmen: the peoples of the Adriatic Sea and Dalmatian coast; merchants, imperialists, pirates and holy warriors. All fought in shifting alliances to protect religion, trade, or empire. None could fly a neutral flag for long, although the Venetians tried hard.

Charles V of Spain and Suleiman, followed later in the century by Philip and Selim, had other fronts to concern them as well. The Spanish were fighting in Northern Europe; the Ottomans were working their way north through the Balkans. Each also had further imperial ambitions: Spain in the Americas, and the Ottomans in present day Syria and east. While Crowley's major focus is on the Mediterranean, he weaves in these other threads as required to understand each power's ups and downs.

The book was at its best when it came to naval battles. Crowley spends time detailing the ships themselves, with good diagrams and maps. Manoeuvring a single ship by sail or oar was a feat in itself. The Battle of Lepanto saw two huge armadas facing each other in formation. In a front only four miles wide were massed six hundred ships, containing more than 140, 000 men. Noise, smoke, and hand to hand combat marked the day, described in compelling detail.

This battle that meant so much at the time is little known today apart from some Shakespearean references. Crowley looks at why that might be. All in all, an excellent general history that leaves the reader looking at European history in a different light.

120rocketjk
feb 19, 2019, 12:18 pm

>119 SassyLassy: Wow, that looks like a fascinating book.

121Dilara86
feb 19, 2019, 2:37 pm

>119 SassyLassy: Rant over
I really liked your rant (and agree with it) ;-)

Empires of the Sea sounds really interesting!

122LolaWalser
Bewerkt: feb 23, 2019, 8:41 pm

This was a chance encounter, and an unexpected book in every way: The battle for home : the vision of a young architect in Syria by Marwa al-Sabouni, a woman who is trying "to put Syria together again, in my imagination".

I started reading just to get a taste and then couldn't stop. Sabouni is a 30-something (I'm guessing) architecture PhD from Homs, married with children, who not only remained in Homs during the war but managed to get her PhD while the city was still getting shelled, amid power outages and restrictions of all sorts.

The big theme of these essays (illustrated with her sketches) is the effect of architecture on human beings and human community--worked out in many examples going backward from the effect human acitivity, most notably and horrifically war, have on architecture.

Sabouni discusses the transformations of the urban structures in Syria since modernisation and how these, in her view, paved the way for sectarian violence that devastated Homs in particular, whereas Damascus, in her counterexample, resisted. I don't think her analysis is complete but her basic arguments are compelling, if for no other reason than that we observe readily enough the deleterious effects of social fragmentation and ghettoisation in many contexts, not just Syrian.

The theme of peripheral, marginalised, suburban newcomers attacking, when opportunity arose, the tightly-knit old urbanites is familiar from Sarajevo and Dubrovnik, for instance. (It makes little conceptual sense in North America where the suburbs are generally more prestigious than the city centres.) Sabouni is by no means a snob--the project that brought her into contact with the Western public was an idea for a reconstruction of a suburb of Homs where fighting had actually first begun--and where her husband hailed from. As she writes, they would not have even met in the ordinary course of life in Homs if not for the fact that both studied architecture at the university.

Regardless of what she may be overlooking, she also conveys a wealth of detail on life in Syria and the mentality and habits of its people, much of which I think would strike Westerners as surreal, such as the sheer material difficulty of getting an education worthy of the name (the architecture department contains only a shelf or so of books) or the rampant corruption everyone has to find a way of dealing with, not against; the hallucinatory arrogance and despotism of professors etc.

Political repression and corruption, growing inequality since opening to privatisation (pre-war) are all factors she acknowledges as having a role in creating Syrian cities such as they were on the brink of war. One that she leaves out is the demographic explosion of a magnitude that would leave even richer Western countries struggling to accommodate with jobs and housing. In 2011, before the war caused millions of Syrians to disperse worldwide, the population had reached more than 21 million--about 14 million or almost three times more people than it had when, as a random reference point, my family left 30 years earlier. Even before the war Syria struggled even to imagine how to deal with all those people. Sabouni describes in riveting and awful detail the tragicomically inadequate housing projects, the fantastically haphazard way in which they came into existence, the lack of infrastructure and mortal dependence on services and jerry-rigging for water, electricity, transport. And then after that chaos, came war.

It remains to be seen whether, once the reconstruction starts, Sabouni's humanistic notions will at least be heeded (to see them prevail is probably hopeless)--her insistence on building for humans and human needs, and not forcing people to conform to abstract architectural programmes, her insight that living and working together, next to each other, introduces people to the other as someone similar to oneself, that this daily commerce is in itself an ethical, humanising transaction, that it was this first loss of contact and interconnections, when, as she writes, "people lost each other", that anticipated war--and will do so wherever such loss occurs.

ETA: Oh, this is great--you can actually hear her talking about some of this in this video from December 18, 2018:

Louder than Words with Marwa al-Sabouni

123lriley
feb 25, 2019, 9:52 am

#122--that looks interesting. I ordered a copy today.

124LolaWalser
feb 25, 2019, 12:02 pm

>123 lriley:

I'm looking forward to your opinions on it.

I have a few misgivings and criticisms I preferred to leave out because it seems to me (certainly I WISH it to be to true) that Sabouni is sincerely attached to Syria's diversity--at least, the diversity that was there before the war--and in the aftermath of such catastrophe and destruction, I will take good will and a helping hand from anyone at all.

125lriley
feb 25, 2019, 12:37 pm

#124--It's hard to parse through what's going on in Syria today. I don't really trust official US positions but that's generally the case for me anyway. Our foreign policy decision making is almost always awful and IMO way too intrusive. I'd value a contemporary account of someone actually living through this conflict a lot more. It would be grounded more in reality anyway.

126LolaWalser
feb 25, 2019, 1:46 pm

>125 lriley:

Yeah, nothing coming from the US officially or from the sellouts looking out for a piece of the post-Assad pie is to be trusted.

Joshua Landis' "Syria Comment" isn't perfect but it's a rare English-language site that provides at least some wider perspective: https://www.joshualandis.com/blog/

127berthirsch
feb 26, 2019, 9:56 am

regarding the discussions on PTSD I would add that being in a defensive position is not determinant. Exposure to war of all types can initiate a PTSD response. Acts of both commission and omission are equally devastating: I killed someone or I didn't act quick enough to save a buddy's life. Survivor guilt : he took my spot on patrol the day he got killed. Exposure to attacks without firing a shot can create devastating impact. PTSD is well documented since the Greek Wars of ancient times. A survey of books with this subject would be interesting.

128berthirsch
feb 26, 2019, 10:04 am

A great Croatian book:

Fox by Dubravka Ugresic

I loved this book. Ugresic, a Croatian writer, currently living in Amsterdam has written a novel which appears to be based on her personal journeys, studies and experiences. "We are all walking texts, we stride through the world with invisible copies adhering to us, numerous versions of ourselves, and we're ignorant of their existence, number and content".

In sections called, A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written and The Theocritus Adventure she focuses on a group of Futurists, Russian avant guard artists called OBEIRU, many of whom get caught up in the Stalin purges of the late 1930s , either killed or sent to Siberia. Lost manuscripts works of art, novels never published she focuses on the plight of artists living “behind the wall”. Amongst these writers she focuses on Boris Pilnyak’s Chinese Story, partially borrowed from a lesser known Japanese writer. Other writers may or may not be real or are fictional characters. “real literary fun begins the moment a story slips an author’s control” seems to summarize the goal Ugresic has for herself.

Other sections focus on Croatians as they deal with the remnants of the war that broke apart Yugoslavia: “war is a time when the worst of humankind floats to the surface…whoever survives must face the consequences.”

Another section is about Nabokov’s travels to the American West in which he captures butterflies and finds new genus, her depiction of this event is sparkling in imagination and discovery.

While reading this I often thought of both Borges and Vila-Matas as similar writers. This is a special book that deserves wide praise and recognition.

Another recent read by the Balkan writer Danilo Kis, The Lute and the Scars an unusual writer with a unique voice.

129LolaWalser
feb 26, 2019, 11:40 am

I loved Fox too (adding touchstone). Ugresic is a scholar of the Russian/Soviet avant-garde and modernist lit and an acquaintance with it helps a lot to understand her frames of reference, style and humour.

130thorold
feb 26, 2019, 3:22 pm

>128 berthirsch: Sounds interesting! I read a couple of her books some years ago and found them very good (I think it was LolaWalser who recommended them, we wanted something Croatian for our book-club), but I’ve somehow lost sight of her again since.

131berthirsch
Bewerkt: feb 26, 2019, 7:11 pm

>130 thorold: my review only hints at the mastery with which she writes. A special unusual book and talent. The section on Nabokov explodes off the page. I look forward to reading more of her work. Anything special you would recommend?

132thorold
feb 27, 2019, 2:02 am

The one I really enjoyed was Baba Yaga laid an egg, all about women and aging and the myths that surround that, and which culminates in a glorious Nabokov-style mock-serious critical study of itself.

133Dilara86
mrt 1, 2019, 7:38 am

L'art de perdre (The Art of Losing) by Alice Zeniter





Writer’s gender: female
Writer’s nationality: French
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: France and Algeria


The title is taken from One Art, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/one-art that starts with this:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

(There are a number of other literary references, usually to Mediterranean classics, such as the Eneid and the Odyssey.)


L’art de perdre has been on my radar for quite some time. It won the Prix Goncourt des lycéens in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Goncourt main prize and the Femina. It was probably one of the most publicised books in 2017-2018, no doubt helped by the fact that its writer, Alice Zeniter, is very good on TV.

It tells the story of Ali, an Algerian – and most importantly Kabyle – peasant, his son Hamid, and granddaughter Naïma. Despite having no love for the French colonial forces, Ali ends up on the side of the native collaborators in the Algerian war of independence, having been forced to submit to the French army in order to protect his family and village from the exactions of a rival family close to the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front). When Algeria becomes independent in 1962, he and thousands of harkis and pieds noirs are repatriated to mainland France, where they are definitely not welcome with open arms. For the most part, harkis* were parked in terrible conditions in work camps, the last of which was closed in the eighties.
There are some very moving pages about the cultural divides and misunderstandings between French mainstream society and Algerian immigrants. Hamid adapts to his new country and in so doing, pretty much rejects his family’s way of life. He marries a French woman and has four daughters, including one of the main protagonists, Naïma, whose first journey to Algeria is the catalyst for the whole novel. The book is a bit of a mixed bag for me. Zeniter isn’t much of stylist (it wasn’t bad, just uninteresting) and I could have done with fewer infodumps and a more original narrative arc, but she does what she (presumably) set out to do very well, which is to shed light on a neglected and misunderstood community - the harkis – by writing a novel that’s, all in all, engaging and very readable.

* There’s a bit about the etymology and meaning of the word harki in the book which I think is interesting. Strictly-speaking, a harki was a member of specific paramilitary groups under the commandment of the French Army. Other Algerians who were unwelcome or even actively threatened after the Independence, such as native colonial workers, should not be called harkis. This is all the more true for their descendants, who took absolutely no part in the war.

A quote :
“À l’école, Annie apprend que la Méditerranée traverse la France comme la Seine traverse Paris.”

134Dilara86
mrt 1, 2019, 10:35 am

À mon âge je me cache encore pour fumer (I still hide to smoke – link to the imdb page) by Rayhana





Writer’s gender: Female
Writer’s nationality: Algeria (and possibly French as well)
Original language: Arabic peppered with French (with French or English subtitles)
Location: a hammam in Algiers (Algeria)


This is a film, but I wanted to include it in the conversation because it is also a published play ( À mon âge je me cache encore pour fumer ) and it is Mediterranean through and through. It is an Algerian, French and Greek collaboration, shot in Algiers and in disused Turkish baths in Thessaloniki, with actors from Algeria, France, Greece, and Israel (Hiam Abbass). Its writer and director, Rayhana, an Algerian actor, playwright and director, had an eventful life. Her father was an Algerian Independence fighter, and she discovered as an adult that her biological mother was a Dutch nurse and not her father’s wife. She left Algeria during the “années de plomb”, that is, the civil war between the government and islamists in the nineties. She was in the news back in 2010 when she was attacked by men who poured petrol over her and tried to burn her alive (they were stopped).

The film takes place mostly behind the closed doors of an Algiers hammam on a women-only day. For that reason, there is a lot of nudity, but none of it is gratuitous or with an orientalist gaze. They’re just women of all ages and body types washing, chatting, arguing, eating, massaging each other and of course, given the film’s title, smoking. Things take a dramatic turn when a young pregnant woman runs to the hammam, seeking shelter and protection from her brother, who wants to kill her because she had sex outside of marriage. Needless to say, the film passes the Bechdel test easily (and the majority of the cast and crew were female). This story will stay with me for a long time.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DS5XbDxaJU

135Dilara86
Bewerkt: mrt 1, 2019, 12:18 pm

I've just read in Le Monde that there are marches against Bouteflika in Algiers right now (it started last week). The police has been firing tear gas. I've seen nothing in English-speaking newspapers so far...
Kamel Daoud has been quite vocal about this https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2019/03/01/algerie-kamel-daoud-estime-que...

136Dilara86
mrt 4, 2019, 12:03 pm

Une enfance corse stories written by Anne-Xavier Albertini, Francis Beretti, Marco Biancarelli, Jérôme Camilly, Michèle Castelli, Jean-Jacques Colonna d'Istria, Jérôme Ferrari, Jacques Fusina, Olivier Jehasse, Annette Luciani, Catalina Maroselli-Mattéoli, Dominique Memmi, Petru Santu Menozzi, Gaston Piétri, Jean-Baptiste Predali, Jean-Pierre Santini, Constant Sbraggia, Jean-Paul Sermonte, Minna Sif, Paul Silvani, Jeanne-Marie Siméoni, Jacques Thiers, Marie-Jean Vinciguerra and collected by Jean-Pierre Castellani and Leïla Sebbar





Writers’ genders: Male and female (skews male)
Writer’s nationality: French
Original language: French, with a smattering of Corsican
Translated into: N/A
Location: Corsica


Jean-Pierre Castellani and Leïla Sebbar asked twenty-three authors and journalists to write about their childhoods in Corsica. Stories are divided between those who lived there all year long, and those who lived on the continent, but spent their summer holidays in their ancestral villages. With one exception – Petru Santu Menozzi, born in 1987 – every participant was born in the sixties or earlier (down to the twenties). That means we get plenty of reminiscences about fetching water, riding donkeys, answering nature calls al fresco, old ladies in black, etc. All very quaint and evocative, but obviously not particularly relevant to modern Corsica. It was a quick and pleasant read. Some authors were much better writers than others, as is generally the case with this type of book. It bumped Jérôme Ferrari’s novel The Sermon on the Fall of Rome to the top of my To-Read list. The man can write.

137rocketjk
mrt 4, 2019, 1:02 pm

I'm aware, of course, that this is a conversation primarily of fiction and/or memoir, but I thought it worth popping in to say that Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by BBC correspondents Laura Silber and Allan Little is an extremely clear and detailed account of the breakup of that Adriatic country, and the many attendant political machinations, wars and atrocities that took place. It was published in 1996. I still have 30 pages to go, so I'm not sure exactly where things are left when the book concludes.

138Dilara86
mrt 4, 2019, 2:32 pm

>137 rocketjk: Thanks for the rec! I was actually looking for a book on that subject...

139rocketjk
mrt 4, 2019, 10:56 pm

>138 Dilara86: You're welcome. My wife and I visited Croatia for vacation a couple of years back. This book was recommended to us by the proprietors of a bookstore in Dubrovnik, so I figure that's some significant credibility. I'm sure it's not the final word on the subject, but I think certainly a very good place to start.

140berthirsch
Bewerkt: mrt 5, 2019, 7:34 am

>139 rocketjk: I think you would love Fox by Dubravka Ugresic. In part it is powered by her own exile from her homeland Croatia.

141berthirsch
mrt 5, 2019, 8:40 am

Regarding the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia I just read a
review by Boyd Tonkin of Dasa Drndic's Belladonna:

Daša Drndić: Belladonna review - a tragicomic journey into Europe's darkness

The visionary Croatian novelist, who died in June, has won Warwick University's Women in Translation prize

by Boyd Tonkin|Sunday, 18 November 2018


Daša Drndić, the Croatian author who died in June aged 71, has posthumously won the second Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her coruscating novel Belladonna. The award, set up last year to help rectify the acute, and long-standing, gender imbalance among authors translated into English, is supported by the University of Warwick. This year, the panel of judges again consisted of Professors Amanda Hopkinson and Susan Bassnett – both eminent translators, and teachers of the art – and myself.

We read 53 submitted works (an encouragingly sharp hike compared to 2017) across a broad spectrum of genres: novels, short-story collections, poetry, children’s books and creative non-fiction. In addition to Belladonna, in Celia Hawkesworth’s virtuoso translation, our shortlist included Esther Kinsky’s River, Zanna Słoniowska’s The House with the Stained-glass Window, Han Kang’s The White Book, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone, and Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights – which this May won the Man Booker International Prize, and which we decided to honour with a special mention. Re-reading our final selection – two books each from Polish and German, one from Korean and one from Croatian – it struck me that each author had in her own way sought to wrestle with the demons of collective hatred, especially as they ran and still run amok across modern Europe. Even the Korean narrator of Han’s The White Book comes to terms with private grief and abandonment while living in a war-haunted European city that can only be Warsaw.

Here in Britain, at a moment when reality-defying groupthink and nationalism have convulsed political life in a way arguably not seen since the First World War, we urgently need to hear literary voices who can bear witness to the damage done by the unrestrained hive mind. Daša Drndić, whose razor-edged wit and outspoken courage glints and slices across every page she wrote, grew up in the immediate aftermath of a total war that had made her native Yugoslavia a killing-field of massacres and persecutions. Born in 1946 to parents who belonged in the bosom of Tito’s multi-national confederation (her Partisan father became a diplomat; her mother was a psychiatrist), she studied in the US and worked as an editor, translator and radio producer. In middle age, she witnessed the post-1990 splintering of Yugoslavia into rival, ethnically-defined nations whose fratricidal wars left over 200,000 dead. The novels that established her reputation, mostly published after 2000, often delve deeper into the region’s bloody history, and above all bring the local crimes of the Holocaust to light. Her fiction mixes historical reportage and documentary material into the compelling stories of real and invented characters. It registers the sheer fragility of peace and tolerance, investigates the motives of the ordinary folk who become architects or accessories of horror and, supremely, recovers and honours the memory of history’s unnumbered victims.

In richly textured narratives which set eccentric individual stories alongside the documentary records of mass crimes and collective ordeals, Drndić cultivates a visionary art of memory. She rescues the names, and the lives, of the lost. In novels such as Trieste and Leica Format, and again in Belladonna, her unsparing gaze comes repeatedly to rest on Nazi genocide and its accomplices in her native Croatia and the neighbouring territories. This work of witness can take some startling forms: not only in her meticulous accounts of single victims and perpetrators, enhanced by uncanny but enigmatic photographs, but also in those signature interludes when she breaks off her narrative to catalogue the dead from some atrocity, or deportation, or another. In Belladonna, for instance, a list of Jewish children sent to death camps from the Netherlands extends to 16 pages. These litanies periodically seize hold of her stories like a spell, a prayer – or a curse.

In Drndić’s eyes, the fuel of group hatred remains forever combustible. Her own experience of strife and slaughter in former Yugoslavia, driven by politicians who played the ethnic card, lies near the surface of all her work. Toxic ideologies of race and nation infect the lives that she imagines, giving rise to a sort of chronic spiritual pain. Especially, perhaps, in Belladonna, her writing glows with an incendiary bleakness worthy of Beckett – and she certainly drew from the fiction of that great Austrian curmudgeon, Thomas Bernhard. But along with that asperity and melancholy comes a gallows humour that often swings into an uproarious mood of mischief and absurdity.

Belladonna recounts the old age, and remembered younger life, of a superannuated Croatian psychologist named Andreas Ban. Andreas is a prickly, disillusioned and hyper-sensitive scrutineer of his own and his country’s plight. Now thrown out off his academic post and forced to subsist on a derisory pension, the long-suffering retiree also undergoes a series of medical crises – cancer, lung disease, impaired vision and (not surprisingly) depression among them. He observes his step-by-step disintegration with a stoic, pitiless and darkly comic gaze.

Trapped in a decaying body that has become “one great degenerative change”, our heroically grumpy hero casts a withering eye on today’s Croatia, that “small, ruined, pompous country”, and a tearful one on the outrages of its past. Stricken by his maladies, Ban has himself turned into a “ravaged city” like the conflict-blasted capitals of the Europe he knows.

His searing exasperation has its tragic aspect – but also an unmistakably comic side. Think Victor Meldrew from One Foot in the Grave, but additionally burdened by all the ghastly cargo of central European history, and you might begin to imagine the furious hilarity that burns through Belladonna. Poor Andreas, “rapidly fraying, inside and out”, truly can’t believe it – the folly and cruelty of official prejudice, and the pettier bigotries that cheapen life in the provincial backwater around him. “The provincial spirit does not like the unknown,” rails Ban, in a diatribe against the insular banality of his shrunken homeland.

Meanwhile, the novel’s historical episodes illuminate the deadly and even genocidal terminus to which that “restrictive spirit” of tribalism may, if unchecked, lead. Voiced with exhilarating zest in Celia Hawkesworth’s translation, the twilight scorn and pity of Andreas Ban makes for a stirring, bracing – but also sulphurously funny – journey through age and memory. He, and we, can grasp the sorrows and abominations of the past only through the jagged, vivid fragments of this fictional-historical mosaic. We learn, though, that a fragment “can be a remnant, something out of which and with which the always risky reconstruction of the lost whole begins”. Drndić’s “parallel stories” of mourning and endurance do in the end come together to affirm “the connectedness of facts and lives”. After all, “it is out of ruins, out of wrecks, out of discarded parts that the new comes into being”. And readers who join Drndić on this shattering passage through the body and through history have another dark discovery in store. Celia Hawkesworth’s translation of E.E.G., Drndić’s final novel and a second tragi-comic episode of Andreas Ban’s incandescent rage against the dying of the light, is published this month.
•Belladonna and E.E.G. by Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth (MacLehose Press)

https://theartsdesk.com/books/da%C5%A1a-drndi%C4%87-belladonna-review-tragicomic...

142rocketjk
Bewerkt: mrt 5, 2019, 11:02 am

>141 berthirsch: Thanks, Bert. That does look quite good. I have several works of fiction on the subject awaiting on my home shelves. Might as well add one more!

143berthirsch
mrt 5, 2019, 2:03 pm

>142 rocketjk: the never ending to read pile. like a Bolano novel one can almost imagine consuming all the titles in one gigantic feast.

144Dilara86
Bewerkt: mrt 6, 2019, 9:14 am

>141 berthirsch: Thank you for this thorough review of Belladonna. Another one for the wishlist...

Ma circoncision (My circumcision) by Riad Sattouf





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: French (French mother, Syrian father)
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: Syria


This graphic autobiography tells in more detail the story of Riad Sattouf’s circumcision, already described in The Arab of the Future.
As the only non-circumcised boy in his Syrian village, Riad is picked on by his peers, who suspect him of being Israeli, which is the worst thing you can be. So, when his father announces that he is going to have him circumcised, he is at once scared and relieved, especially since he is promised a giant Grendizer toy robot (Goldorak in French). Many pages are devoted to the little boy’s theories about what will happen to him - his understanding of the procedure is quite hazy and nobody will explain. Things do not exactly go to plan: his wound gets infected and he misses two and a half months of school, the toy never materialises, and he learns that Jews are circumcised too, meaning that he’ll have to find another way of proving that he belongs in the village. A wince-inducing, funny, tender but also critical look at Syrian life in the eighties.

145LolaWalser
Bewerkt: mrt 6, 2019, 12:40 pm

>134 Dilara86:

Thanks for bringing this up. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be easily available here but at least I know to look for it.

>141 berthirsch:

today’s Croatia, that “small, ruined, pompous country”

Heh, so true.

>144 Dilara86:

Do they taunt him with "Israeli", or is it "Jew"? I think the latter was the case in L'Arabe du futur. For what it's worth, thinking back to our time in Syria, I'd say that in the popular vision and usage the two are entirely conflated, but even kids would probably avoid (i.e. know to avoid, assuming they'd even heard of it) talking about "Israel", since doing so admits its existence and construction as a non-Arab entity. (Note that this effort at "linguistic genocide" wasn't limited to Arabs; the Israelis have dismissed Palestinians through similar strategies.)

Well, I have oodles of on-topic books going but as is usually the case my ambition outstrips my resources (and soon, the time limits for this thread...) But, just so to keep my toe in, at least a few remarks on How to cure a fanatic by Amos Oz, a short collection of two essays and an interview. Short as it is, I could spend a week commenting it, but no doubt everyone else would be better off simply reading it.

In "Between right and right" Oz postulates that it's futile trying to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of "who's right", and that instead people ought to concentrate on achieving peace. For him this would be doable through a partition along the pre-1967 lines, a two-state solution with some special dispensations regarding the holy sites in Jerusalem. In this scenario Arabs would have to give up the cities they lost in 1948--give up, that is, any dream of getting them back.

It's this point that makes me feel that Oz's idea is, no matter how right, also hopelessly unrealistic. Everything he says is true but impossible. The Arabs will never give up the dream of return--and Jews ought to understand this better than anyone.

In "How to cure a fanatic" Oz suggests that the basic problem with fanaticism is a lack of empathy. This, too, I think is true. However, we should recognise that this lack of empathy doesn't occur through chance, ignorance or lack of exposure, but is on the contrary a carefully cultivated trait, the sine qua non of combattants. What difference does this make? Quite a big one, I think. It means that as long as a cause for battle can be defined (no matter how "rightly" or "wrongly"), appeals to individual psychology and experience won't do away with fanaticism. Fanaticism is a weapon, not a mood--and not for nothing is it the weapon of choice of the poor and the outnumbered.

In the interview "The order of a teaspoon", Oz explains the metaphor of a teaspoon of water used to douse the flames. If you can't bring a bucket, bring a glass; if you can't bring a glass of water, bring a teaspoon--everyone has a teaspoon. Everyone could do a little something that, if it doesn't solve the crisis, at least chips at it, at least doesn't feed it.

146Dilara86
mrt 7, 2019, 1:30 pm

>145 LolaWalser: They say Israeli.

147LolaWalser
Bewerkt: mrt 10, 2019, 2:04 pm

>146 Dilara86:

Thanks.

One more book from Israel, Les Arabes dansent aussi by Sayed Kashua (English edition: Dancing Arabs). Its unnamed first-person protagonist seems to share a good deal of Kashua's personal history but I'd hesitate to assume the identification is complete in the biographical details, more likely there's a consistent psychological resonance. Kashua is prominent as one of the (apparently) very few Israeli Arabs who write in Hebrew.

The book consists of more or less chronologically ordered vignettes which begin placidly enough in tone but then, as the narrator ages and suffers from increasing "complexification" of life under the extraordinary stress that Arab residents of Israel must endure, they spin out in bursts of satirical fantasy and black humour.

What comes through most clearly is the absurd, untenable, desperate, cleaving condition of Arabs in Israel, the impossible situation, the rejection that faces even those who are eager only to live peacefully and assimilate even into the Israeli majority. One wonders not that anyone might turn to fanaticism and terrorism, but that not everyone does.

The saddest bit for me is an early story, when the narrator is still small and goes to his village's wretched school. Through some goodwill-building exchange programme, the school receives on a visit a group of Jewish schoolboys, who spend the day with their assigned Arab hosts in their homes. The narrator and the Jewish boy assigned to him hit it off immediately, so much so that, when the time for a return visit comes and the Arab boys go to the Jewish school, the mix-up resulting in the Arab boy's assignment to a different Jewish boy causes extreme tearful upset on both sides.

You know that hypocritical pious twaddle about "remembering history so as not to repeat it"--well, sometimes I think we would do better with a general total amnesia. Clearly those two boys and any number of such boys had no problem whatsoever in finding instantly a way to like each other, to feel close, to want to be together. But children are ignorant and act well in ignorance and we can't have that--indoctrinating them with religion and history makes sure they will do evil knowingly, as civilized educated people must.

Kashua and his family eventually left Israel for the States in 2014. I couldn't find out where he is now; in 2018 he was still in Illinois.

148LolaWalser
mrt 10, 2019, 2:03 pm

This is wonderful (one minute long):

Scenes from Ugarit & Latakia, Syria March 29, 2018

149lriley
mrt 10, 2019, 2:13 pm

#147--another book I think I'm going to order. I got the Marwa al-Sabouni. I just haven't entered it yet. I can be lazy.

150LolaWalser
mrt 10, 2019, 2:50 pm

>149 lriley:

Great, I'd recommend it very much. I placed a library order for a collection of his articles for Ha'aretz, Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life. Truth be told, before reading Kashua I hardly imagined a person like him existed, that is an Arab existing in Israel, and actively trying not just to communicate with the Jews but live with them, among them. (If asked, I'd have imagined most Arabs in Israel having a sort of ghostly passive co-existence in isolated enclaves with little but the minimal official--and by and large painful--contacts with the Israeli authorities.)

Googling tells me that Kashua had worked on an Israeli TV series called Arab Labor which is available on DVD here and which sounds as if it would be worth looking at. "Arab labor" is apparently an Israeli expression for shoddy, subpar work.

151lriley
mrt 10, 2019, 3:50 pm

#150--I saw a quote today from Netanyahu in which he said (their elections are coming up) that Israel is not a state of all its people(s)--only its Jewish people. He went on to say that that had been codified. I see Israel currently as an apartheid like state and there's never going to be a peaceful resolution if the state (which has practically all the power...but not all because people can always find ways to resist) is not willing to negotiate or compromise on anything and this has and will continue to have real geopolitical ramifications that negatively effects practically every other nation on the planet. The entire region has turned into a political quagmire that revolves in great part around this issue and the United States part in it has been atrocious for decades but getting much much worse under the current regime.

152LolaWalser
mrt 10, 2019, 5:19 pm

>151 lriley:

That has been the doctrine of the right wing in Israel forever. It's mind-boggling that we have entered a sixth decade of occupation not only with no resolution in sight, but with ever-increasing Palestinian suffering.

For a comprehensive view of the situation in all its (il)legal aspects and the mechanisms of repression the Israelis use against Arabs (be they the stateless Palestinians in the occupied territories or the "lesser" Israeli citizens or residents of Arab ethnicity in Israel) I recommend very highly A half century of occupation by Gershon Shafir. It's not very long and for a dry-sounding book it reads as swiftly and shockingly as a thriller (alas). While he includes the necessary historical framework, he is not writing a partisan polemic, but describing the situation from the standpoint of social sciences. He concludes with a sort of "feasibility" analysis of the possible peaceful solutions that, at least theoretically, must still be considered possible.

But Netanyahu and his ilk who wish and work for the destruction of Palestinians currently have that orange pig in the White House to shore them up with unprecedented licence.

153lriley
mrt 10, 2019, 6:03 pm

I'll check Shafir's book out as well. I read Ben Ehrenreich's book The way to the Spring last year which was a contemporary view of what is going on in the villages of the West Bank. He's the son of Barbara Ehrenreich famous for her Nickel and dimed.

154LolaWalser
Bewerkt: mrt 11, 2019, 4:35 pm

>153 lriley:

Shafir's book was published in 2017 so it's still "fresh" but I think it will remain an invaluable resource for a good while yet in any case.

Incidentally, I picked up at the same time a number of Khamsin ("Journal of revolutionary socialists of the Middle East"), number 6 from 1978 with the main theme of "Women in the Arab world". There's also an article titled "Zionism and its scarecrows", and I think this little bit referring to it in the editorial is worth quoting, considering the moment we are in.

Zionist propaganda has erected a number of scarecrows to deter attack by the left. One of the most effective of these is the bogus identification of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The article on Zionism and its scarecrows will, we hope, arm the left in the struggle against zionist ideology and propaganda.


FORTY YEARS ON!--and what has changed? Well--maybe in 1978 they didn't know the charges of antisemitism would be led by fascist pigs like Trumpo...

One more addition to the thread, Agar by Albert Memmi, a Tunisian-Jewish-Arab-Italian French national who is, wow, 99 years old this year... Actually I meant to read a different book by him, a non-fiction look at Jews in the Maghreb, but I couldn't ferret it out in my chaos and instead fell on this novel about a matrimonial catastrophe. (Which he dedicated to his wife...)

Agar (a reference to Sarah's Egyptian servant Hagar whom she gave to Abraham for breeding purposes) was published in 1955, just before Tunisia gained independence and Jews and Christians left en masse. My edition came with no less than two prefaces by the author, one from the sixties and another from the eighties, interesting for noting that the original weak reception in France was followed by a belated success thirty years later, as African immigrants and mixed marriages started to loom much larger in popular consciousness.

A young Tunisian Jewish (non-practicing) student of medicine meets in Paris a young Franco-German Catholic-from-Alsace student of chemistry, they fall in love and marry. We meet them as they are arriving on boat to Tunis, where they (or he) decided they would live. As he reenters the world of his roots, the man begins to have doubts and worries about how his wife will be received by his family and how she will see his family. The riotous domestic scenes filled with infernal noise, clutter, gaggles of children hanging off their eternally-pregnant mothers are perfectly rendered, all the messy love and joyful disorder of those humble, vulgar, provincial houses of Mediterranean patriarchs.

The novel traces the increasing difficulties of the young woman to adapt (or submit) and the problems she poses for the Jewish community. Without the support of the latter, the existence of the couple is so precarious in that environment that it can be said to be impossible--in fact, they discover they aren't even legally married in the jurisdiction of Tunis and the man isn't even legally the father of their baby son. When they try to arrange for a religious marriage (going against the principles of them both), they are shocked to find themselves refused.

I confess I wasn't that taken by the intimate problems of the couple as such and wondered more about the background of the story, which is obliquely thrown into intriguing relief. One thing I found interesting was the absence of references to anyone outside the Jews in what was a predominantly Muslim matrix. I think that's not casual; it reflects the fission between different faith groups that, in the domestic sphere, reached 100%. And yet there's this eerie similarity in the way of life, tastes, mentality...

I wonder whether Memmi didn't fudge his theme by choosing to contrast as strangers the Tunisian Jew and the French Catholic--perhaps it would have been more... informative... if his protagonist had married a girl from one of those communities that in such a bewildering fashion mirrored yet simultaneously excluded his own. Of course, he was preoccupied with the problem of the relationship between the colonisers and the colonised, but it would seem history played a trick on him--with the gain of independence Tunis, like many other ex-colonies and protectorates, became even less tolerant of non-Muslims and it's not clear that to Muslims non-Muslim natives of their countries ever had the same status of the colonised. When Memmi wants to highlight the power balance between the superior nordic blonde and the inferior swarthy Mediterranean, the latter is already stripped of even that flimsy hold on firm identity. Who is he speaking for then? How many exiles can a single life hold, how many not-belongings attach to one individual...

(Reminds me of a couple of pied noir families I knew in New York, both from Algeria. Both happened to look stereotypically Arab but were French Christians of old provenance from the Maghreb. Both had escaped to France in the sixties and eventually emigrated to the US because they didn't feel at home in France, nor, as I understood, were they treated as if they belonged.)

155lriley
mrt 11, 2019, 7:09 pm

#154--Trump and his administration have done a lot of damage but the silver lining is the almost crushing defeat the republican party was handed in the mid-terms and I expect more of the same in 2020 and particularly if Donald is still about to circle the wagons around. I have to say that I'm head over heels in love with Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar and a few others. It's like I've been waiting for politicians like them all of my life and I expect there are going to be others like them coming because they have made a marked impact on the body politic and are an inspiration to younger voters especially.....Fox news and a lot of conservatives are insanely obsessed with them too.

Omar has been hit with a lot of flack for her comments on Israel. Republicans and even a lot of democrats want her off the Foreign Affairs committee. It's partly that and partly her evisceration of Elliott Abrams--a promoter of death squads in El Salvador who has become one of Trump's leading men on Venezuela.He has friends in both parties though. But as to Omar's remarks on AIPAC--they are all true--the Israeli govt. has been buying congress people on both sides for decades and funding campaigns against those they've decided not to like. This interference I find very objectionable. Not that the United States isn't always attempting (mostly successfully) to leverage the political life of other countries--in that respect it's quid pro quo but neither is right. Now maybe Omar could have said things a little more delicately but as a Somalian refugee that's probably due more to the fact that she struggles a little with the English language--even so my suspicions are that wouldn't make any difference. The thing about this loyalty issue--many states have passed laws requiring people taking state government jobs or contractors getting state govt. contracts to pledge that they won't criticize or protest the state of Israel in any way which is crazy and it seems the many in congress want to follow suit and make it federal. Omar objected to that and since there's been a campaign to brand her as an anti-semite. Her and Rashida Tlaib (another target) are the first Muslim women ever elected to congress--that's part of it too. I believe Tlaib's grandmother lives in the West Bank.

The entire thing is ridiculous. If the state of Israel gave Palestinian Christians and Muslims the same basic civil rights as their Jewish citizens there wouldn't be any argument. Those in power won't do that and they've got our govt. fully behind them which is very nice for our rapture happy christian imbecilic fundamentalists who go to bed every night dreaming about Armageddon and hoping to be sucked up to a cloud some day so they can walk hand in hand with Jesus but it's not very nice for almost everyone else.

I'd rather not go on and on about this though--I'll be thinking about it all night.

Anyway I have Shafir's book on order too.

156Dilara86
mrt 12, 2019, 3:12 am

This thread is not good for my wishlist: I've added another half-dozen books thanks to LolaWalser and lriley...

157lriley
Bewerkt: mrt 12, 2019, 8:38 am

#156--Lola's had a lot more to recommend than I have. The African side of the Mediterranean for one is not really a strength of mine. In the past I've just dabbled with a few Israeli and Lebanese writers and then some more well known like Naguib Mahfouz, Assia Djebar and Tahar Ben Jelloun. I keep a notebook of everything I read and that region is a very sparse one for me. The continent of Asia in general is another. I just read Chraibi's Mother comes of age and he is only the second Moroccan writer I've read--though technically I believe Paul Bowles and Juan Goytisolo lived out their lives there.

So anyway I do appreciate the chance to expand my reading about this region out a bit--even though as I've gotten older I've slowed down on how much I do read.

158LolaWalser
Bewerkt: mrt 12, 2019, 2:09 pm

>155 lriley:

The appearance of AOC, Tlaib and Omar on the US political scene is truly fairy-tale fantastic.

>156 Dilara86:, >157 lriley:

Oh dear, I hope everyone finds those worthwhile. I have much more on the pertinent topics but my eyes are big while my time is short; I regret I'll fail to give an even somewhat coherent picture of my reading on the theme "Mediterranean".

At least the following should give some respite to y'all's wishlists... This could and perhaps should also go in the "classics in their own countries" thread but I don't like cross-posting in the same group.

"and now for something completely different"

Let me trumpet the glory of my homeboy Marko Marulić Splićanin (1450-1524), in textbook-speak no less than "the father of Croatian literature", therefore as "real" a classic as one can be--and he passes the currency test too, being on the 500 HRK note. ;) Actually what's on it is the likeness of the sculpture by Ivan Meštrović from the 1920s



Marulić led the life of a typical Renaissance man of letters, practicing law and writing on various intellectual topics (he's credited with inventing the term and defining the notion of "psychology") as well as poetry--most of that in Latin, in which he corresponded far and wide within Europe (ironically, he'd be far better known to a, say, educated Englishman of his own time than ours--there are more contemporary translations of his works into English than today's.) But he also wrote in the vernacular, presumably mainly for the enjoyment of the literary circle in Split and on the island of Hvar (which had a wonderfully developed and active cultural life, more liberal and progressive than the relatively conservative administrative and ecclesiastical centre like Split).

One such notable work is Judita (pron.: Yooditah) from 1501, a long poem in six books on the Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes.

I'm very glad I read it again (first time since high school) because there is so much more I'm capable of appreciating now. There seems to be little point in describing the contents or style to people unlikely to access a translation, let alone the original, but some other things may interest. For example, that the language Marulić wrote in was čakavian (pron.: chakavian) and ikavian, i.e. an archaic form of today's Dalmatian dialect (my own, by the way), which is largely unintelligible to other regional languages and the "standard", school-taught Croatian.

As Dalmatian language is dying out, actively suppressed, attacked and deliberately neglected for decades, not to mention passively eroded by the media supremacy of the štokavian (pron: shtokavian), ijekavian language of northern Croatia and hinterlandish Hercegovina, it becomes ever more bittersweet that the "father" of Croatian literature was a Dalmatian speaking and writing Dalmatian.

Cover of my edition from 1950 and a facsimile of the frontispiece of the second edition (1521, Venice). The text goes (including a typo, "oslodobi" for "oslobodi") "Libar Marca Marula Splichianina uchom se vsdarsi Istoria Sfete vdouice Judit u versih haruacchi slosena : chacho ona vbi voivodu Olopherna posridu voische gnegoue: i oslodobi puch israelschi od veliche pogibili." (ETA: and the line below informs it's sold in Zadar by one Jerolim Mirković...)

 

159lriley
mrt 13, 2019, 8:51 am

#158--I used to use the local library a lot. I'd be in there every couple weeks--spend an hour or two just running up and down the shelves--borrow two or three books at a time. I had never heard of Robert Pinget but after borrowing the Inquistory I became a big fan--same with Ricardo Piglia and his Artificial Respiration. Those are just a couple examples there were a number of others. There's something to be said for using local community resources like your library and it's unfortunate that local libraries depend more and more on volunteers because so many communities cut off funds for such and so they cut their paid workers. But anyway I noted Judita--and I'm familiar with the story through a play by Jean Giradoux which was from another book I borrowed my local library.

160berthirsch
mrt 13, 2019, 9:04 am

Huge fan of local libraries and are fortunate to have access to NYPL. But even in Sparta, NJ we had a great independent local library, more a mainstay of community activities- it was there that I discovered WG Sebald's Vertigo.

I now go to the 42nd Street Main NYPL library 2 days a week and love searching through the collection- Sephardic poetry from the 1300s was a recent eye opener I came across as I prepared for a trip to Catalonia.

161Dilara86
mrt 13, 2019, 1:41 pm

Mal de pierres (Mal di pietre - From the Land of the Moon) by Milena Agus, translated by Dominique Vittoz





Writer’s gender: Female
Writer’s nationality: Italian
Original language: Italian
Translated into: French
Location: Sardinia (Italy), including Cagliari, and Milan (Italy)



This short novel by Sardinian author Milena Agus describes the life of three generations of Sardinians mainly through the story of the narrator’s grandmother, a “lunatic” – hence the English title - who suffers from kidney stones – hence the French and Italian title. The grandmother is a wonderful and complex character, a thwarted writer with an overactive – and quite romantic – imagination who left a very interesting “diary”. She might also be unreliable as a narrator… I loved this novel and wished my review could do it justice. Thankfully, there are plenty of very good and thorough member reviews on its work page.

162Dilara86
mrt 15, 2019, 6:46 am

>158 LolaWalser: Thank you for this! Marko Marulić ticks so many boxes... It seems I might have to buy the English translation of Judita. I tried all the permutations and versions of his name I could think of based on his wikipedia page, but I could not find any books by him on my (French) library website. It just came up with an audio recording of a concert titled "Sacres et sacrifices : Judith" by Katarina Livljanić, which I will listen to because it seems to be Judita the poem set to medieval-style music, which I like...

Speaking of the "currency test" and classics in their own countries unavailable in translation, the first time I realised we had a problem was when I was visiting Slovenia back when the tolar was still in use. Having been told about who the face on a banknote belonged to: Prešeren, national poet and cultural hero, I tried to find some of his works in translation in Postojna's bookshop, to no avail, and then back home in the UK, again with no luck. It seems scandalous to me that a writer can be considered a figurehead of the Romantic period in his own country, and be almost unheard of in others... (But there's hope - his complete poems were published in French in 2013. The publisher's website does not look very professional at all - it looks more like a mouthpiece for Kolja Micevic -, but it's a start.)

163Dilara86
mrt 15, 2019, 10:53 am

Sorry about those three posts in a row...

Le Guépard (The Leopard - Il Gattopardo) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, translated by Jean-Pierre Manganaro





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Italian
Original language: Italian
Translated into: French
Location: Sicily


I’d been meaning to read this novel for years, but I could never find it in the library! I now know why: I was looking for it on the L (for Lampedusa) shelves, when I should have been looking in the Ts for Tomasi... Anyway, I got hold of it eventually. There was a borrowing queue, no doubt due to the fact that the revue Europe dedicated its last issue to its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. I have now joined the thousands of LT users who have catalogued it, and I won’t feel like the only person who hasn’t read it anymore!
In many of ways, it’s like reading a Barsetshire novel. The writing style and the subject matter are rather old-fashioned – almost Victorian. I was quite surprised it was written in the fifties. The main character, Don Fabrizio, is a nobleman who manages to be whiggish and conservative at the same time. He is witnessing the end of an era, and really, the politics of the time - the novel starts with the arrival of Garibaldi’s troops in Sicily in May 1860 and the subsequent unification of Italy – are as important to the novel, if not more, as the love and marriage shenanigans that move the story forward. I learned quite a bit about Italian history (that is, I had to look things up in order to make sense of the novel) and it was quite an enjoyable read, if on the snobbish side, which again, ties up with the Victorian feel of the novel.
NB: My copy came with two postfaces. The first one was very useful. It was written by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, the author’s adoptive son who inspired one of the novel’s main characters – Don Frabrizio’s nephew Tancredi, and it contains enlightening passages from the author’s letters. The second one, written by the translator, was almost unreadable, I’m sorry to say.

164LolaWalser
mrt 17, 2019, 12:50 pm

>162 Dilara86:

Yes, it's sad how biased and fragmentary are the perceptions of literature outside the few "big" traditions--or even of those, depending on where one is situated (looking out from within the Anglo-sphere, or the French, German, Russian etc.) Unfortunately, so many factors combine to create this situation it's difficult to see what any one thing one could do to change it.

If that translator of Prešeren is the same person I'd heard of, you should be in good hands; at least, he was extremely well-regarded as a translator from French (I specifically remember the praise of his work on Valéry, a difficult enough nut to crack in any language).

I hope I don't inadvertently send anyone off on wild goose chases or tempt into undue expenditure... As regards something like the Croatian Renaissance, I might look for a survey or anthology-type publication first, on the off chance that sort of thing might be more common than monographs dedicated to single authors.

Basically, while Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia suffered the catastrophe of Ottoman conquest with the ensuing total inhibition of cultural development, the territories of today's Croatia had the relatively better fate of being oppressed by fellow Catholics who were, more or less, ushering modernity. Dalmatia, having been sold to Venice in the beginning of the 15th century by a weak Magyar king, was mercilessly exploited--but at the same time, embracing humanism and Renaissance values after the Italian model allowed the small literate elite concentrated in urban centres on the coast and on the islands (the circles in Split, Šibenik, Zadar, Hvar...) to start developing a novel, secular vernacular literature. Dubrovnik, a free city-state that managed for centuries to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Turks and the Venetians, created a particularly rich and original tradition (over which, sad to say, nationalist vultures east and west keep fighting to this day...)

Switching gears again, I hopped back to Morocco with Mohammed Mrabet's The Lemon. Presumably set in the 1950s Tangier, it follows the ten-to-thirteen(?)-year-old Abdeslam after he's chased out of his father's house for disobedience, specifically the boy's refusal to go to (French) school. For such a young lad Abdeslam has an acute sense of his superiority as a Muslim to the "Nazarenes". Religion in fact seems to be the core of his identity, his source of strength--and a kid alone in the streets certainly needs lots of it.

Abdeslam goes to live with Bachir, a dock worker with a dissolute lifestyle (alcohol, prostitutes) and a taste for boys. He eventually makes clear to Abdeslam that he has designs on him, but would prefer, at least when sober, to have the boy come to him rather than force him. Obviously the situation is untenable for long and there's a violent resolution.

Apparently this tale, along with many others, was dictated by Mrabet to Paul Bowles, and it does flow more like speech, unadorned and idiosyncratic. Highly recommended.

165SassyLassy
mrt 18, 2019, 11:40 am

Bosnia and Herzegovina



Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan by Ivo Andrić translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth (2018)
first published as Omerpaša Latas in 1968
also known as The Pasha's Concubine and Other Tales

The inhabitants of Sarajevo had good reason for alarm that day in 1850. The Sultan in far off Istanbul was sending his latest seraskier to impose order by whatever means required in this distant part of his Ottoman Empire. This time around, the seraskier arrived with a large well equipped army. Its leader had quelled rebellions in Albania, Syria and Kurdistan already. His mission here was
to discipline and bring to heel not the rebellious populace nor an external enemy but those who had ruled Bosnia for centuries and who had until the previous day been called the sultan's sons: the beys, the leaders and members of the most prominent families. ... He was not coming as an authority to rule and manage, but to wage war and punish.

Who was this potentate? His Turkish name was Omer Pasha Latas, and he was a convert to the Muslim faith. The people of Bosnia and Herzegovinia, however, knew that this man who held the highest military office in the sultan's forces was not only a former Christian, but also an Austrian, Micó Latas; a man who had fled that country for Bosnia twenty-five years earlier, then made his way to Turkey. There, through diligence and hard work, he had achieved his current status. These were characteristics to be admired. Yet such a transformation also requires a mastery of deceit to hide away and bury one part of life. In other words, this was a man to be feared.

This idea of a person from two worlds, one who never really fits into either, is a theme to which Andrić returns again and again throughout the book. Unfinished at the time of his death, it is not really a novel, but rather a series of sketches of those around Omer Pasha. Each is not only complete in itself, but also serves to give the reader another piece of the puzzle that is Omer. Each of these characters shares in one way or another that lack of belonging. There is a pervading sense of loneliness in this book, an inability to make human connections, even though some of these very same people are indispensable to the Bosnian foray. The vignette technique highlights this.

Eventually this army too will leave, "... a blessing in this country where pleasure is scarce." Over a hundred years later, Andrić knew this all too well about his country, a place with its own conflicting worlds. Switching from third person narrator to first person as the army finally leaves, he says
What counts is that they are leaving, vanishing, disappearing, at least from our country, and we are staying on our own land, to endure, to live out our lives, to eat their bread as well as our own, and to warm ourselves in this sun, which was once also theirs. That is the only victory of which we are capable. And it is our right that we be victorious.


__________________

Thinking about this book in relation to this quarter's theme, it served once again to reinforce for me the idea that the Mediterranean is far more than the European France, Spain and Italy, that immediately spring to mind for so many, but that there is that other part, hidden in a way behind Italy, that could have made the history of western Europe so different, had this particular empire had a different outcome. The book also demonstrates the constant to and fro of so many peoples through these regions. Living in Canada, which likes to pride itself on multiculturalism, a strong component of cultural belief and government policy, it makes me wonder if that would be possible had there been a different history here. Time to go back to Michael Ignatieff's Blood and Belonging.

There was a real Omar Pasha, with a biography and career very like that described by Andrić. In both his book and in history, Omar Pasha went as far as the Austrian border with his army. Around the Mediterranean, he was active in Albania, Montenegro and Lebanon, as well as Bosnia Herzegovina. Later he would defeat a large Russian force in the Crimea.



Lord Raglan, Omer Pasha and Marshal Pelissier during the Crimean War (1854-56)
photograph by Roger Fenton/ Imperial War Museum

166rocketjk
Bewerkt: mrt 18, 2019, 12:10 pm

Just popping in to say that Penelope Lively's wonderful novel, Moon Tiger, which I finally just read, includes some good scenes of the WW2-era Cairo experienced by the British and extremely vivid renderings of the desert tank battles to the west.

167LolaWalser
mrt 18, 2019, 1:18 pm

>165 SassyLassy:

That's a great write-up. I must admit I struggle to parse Bosnia as a Mediterranean country (I think there's barely a single outlet onto the Adriatic?), but there are some interesting comparisons to be made with the Maghreb...

>166 rocketjk:

Heh--I remember that as readable enough, but I couldn't stand the author's/narrator's voice, the tone of the whole thing. The epitome, I thought, of Brit/English white supremacist narcissism, swanning around the world, which is of course nothing but an exotic playground conjured for the flippant, sneering pleasure of those overprivileged, overgrown, cliqueish children.

Oh, which reminds me... of a pre-WWII book on Albania by such one couple I was hoping to squeeze in here... Given how many such books exist, there really should be a label. "Brexitannian Legends" perhaps. ;)

168thorold
mrt 18, 2019, 1:28 pm

>165 SassyLassy: That’s one I was thinking of reading as well - it’s moved up my list a bit now - Thanks!

>167 LolaWalser: I’ve got Joyce Cary’s Memoir of the Bobotes around somewhere - that probably almost fits your description, although he wasn’t quite swanning around, he was a cook in a Red Cross unit in the 1912 war.

169rocketjk
Bewerkt: mrt 18, 2019, 2:45 pm

>167 LolaWalser: C'est la vie. I didn't find the narrative voice as unexamined as all that. There was, I thought, an awareness, even a subtext, of all you point out. That's what I meant when I referred to WW2-era Cairo as "experienced by the British."

170LolaWalser
mrt 18, 2019, 1:57 pm

>168 thorold:

Ah, but it goes without saying that a Brexitannian cook is worth any number of ridiculous Ruritanians, from peasants to the princes (especially the princes...) :)

171Dilara86
mrt 19, 2019, 8:33 am

La mère (The mother) by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Chantal Moiroud





Writer’s gender: Female
Writer’s nationality: Italian
Original language: Italian
Translated into: French
Location: Italy


I discovered Natalia Ginzburg recently, thanks to an article in The Guardian. This book contains five of her short stories, spanning her whole writing career. As the book’s title suggests, they’re centred on female characters in family settings. It’s well-observed psychological fiction. The first three stories could have been written by the Maupassant of A woman’s life. I sincerely hope that the world she shows – with very young women in arranged marriages or marriages of convenience – was not the norm in early twentieth-century Italy.

172Dilara86
Bewerkt: mrt 19, 2019, 9:09 am

Ma mère et moi by Brahim Metiba





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Algerian
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: S. in Algeria (possibly a fictional version of Skikda)


This is a book about bridging divides – between a man who lives in France and his Algerian mother, between a gay man and his reflexively homophobic mother, between a progressive man and his conservative mother, between an atheist man and his reflexively religious and anti-Semitic mother, and more generally, between Jews and Muslims. In order to get closer to his mother, to express things that he cannot say out loud to her*, and to perhaps sow the seeds of tolerance for the Other – namely Jewish people (they love their mothers too and their mothers love them, you know!) but also gay people, the narrator reads Book of my Mother** by Albert Cohen to his illiterate Muslim mother over the course of twenty-three days. It’s very short and sparse and understated – and all the stronger for it. There is no epiphany. The mother responds to the pathos in the book, and she’s definitely on the side of the mother, but she tends to equivocate when prompted to renounce her prejudices. And the narrator doesn’t push her. Every time things get awkward, they start to sing to diffuse conflict– usually Asmahan’s 1944 song about Vienna being paradise (good for them if they’re able to hold all the notes! - lyrics here), which of course is in itself a bridge between East and West.
I loved this fictional autobiography, and I will definitely read the other two books that make up Metiba’s family trilogy.

For those of you who would like to start reading in French, but don’t know where to start, this would be a good choice: it’s very short (57 pages) and easy to understand. It’s mostly written in the present tense with simple, concise sentences, but it’s also literary and grown-up.



* This made me realise how rare it is that works of fiction describe the way people use works of fiction to express their feelings to others or work out problems between them, when it seems to be a pretty widespread mechanism where I am.

** I have a bone to pick with Book of my Mother. I thought it was self-centred and condescending towards the mother. If you find your mother small-minded, uneducated and not too bright, and you’re going to put these things in writing for others to read, do it the way Metiba does it, and not Cohen – his feelings of superiority drips off the page. But then, Cohen cries what feels to me like crocodile tears about the fact that he neglected her and now she’s dead, whereas Metiba makes the effort to reach out to her and try and engage her, which has to be healthier as well as nicer.

173rocketjk
mrt 19, 2019, 11:51 am

>171 Dilara86: I've been gradually reading through the anthology, The Norton Book of Women's Lives, edited by Phyllis Rose. It's a collection of excerpts from memoirs by notable women. By coincidence, I just recently read the excerpt from Ginzberg's memoir, Family Sayings (Lessico Famigliare).

174Dilara86
mrt 19, 2019, 12:06 pm

>173 rocketjk: This looks interesting. From what I can see on the work page, the editor took more pain than usual to showcase diverse writers. How are you finding it so far?

175LolaWalser
mrt 19, 2019, 12:43 pm

>171 Dilara86:

Ginzburg was from a cultivated urban Jewish family and that sounds like a pretty exotic theme for her--not that she missed acquaintance with sexism and machismo. I don't think forcing marriage on very young girls (how very young? Fifteen? Or nine?) was ever the "norm" in Italy, although it would be necessary to know first where and who, as well as define what is meant by "forcing". In one sense all transactions between genders in a discriminatory misogynistic society are unfree and "forced". The sheer general societal expectation that a girl will be married by 18 or so, or married at all, or produce children, or the requisite numbers of sons etc.--all that is a form of violence on woman's autonomy and personhood.

But when such expectations are so deeply embedded in society that even most women take them for granted, it would seem that saying a particular marriage was "forced" would at a minimum require actual physical intervention and/or psychological brutalisation. Which no doubt happened (and I presume is the topic of those stories?) but not, I'd say, as a "norm".

Getting married in one's teens or doing so without a romantic attachment (which is, I suppose, what a "marriage of convenience" is) was common far beyond Italy, to say nothing of obeying one's parents' (or at least father's) wishes.

Mind you, when it comes to general attitudes to women and women's rights, Italy's one of the worst, at least in Europe. Probably can't be helped as long as that infernal closet cases boys' club in Rome is around...

If you're interested in the situation of women in Italy and the beginnings of emancipation (disregarding the early history with the occasional uppity medieval aristocrat or courtesan), I'd recommend to start with Sibilla Aleramo.

>172 Dilara86:

See, I said Cohen was Med-typical. Whatever sets apart the faiths in the Med, misogyny unites them.

176rocketjk
mrt 19, 2019, 2:10 pm

>174 Dilara86: I'm finding it very enjoyable and interesting, learning a lot about some people and eras I never knew much (or anything) about and also revisiting a few writings, such as the excerpt from Anne Frank's diary. Naturally, the collection makes me want to go in search of many of the full memoirs.

177Dilara86
mrt 20, 2019, 1:47 pm

>175 LolaWalser: Thank you for the recommendation! I've added A Woman to my wishlist.
In my post, I wrote of young women (late teens, early twenties) in arranged marriaged, which I would have thought would be on the wane in the 20th century. Forced marriages are another kettle of fish, although obviously there's a continuum between "arranged" and "forced", for the reasons you outlined...

178LolaWalser
mrt 20, 2019, 9:47 pm

>177 Dilara86:

I presume you mean on the wane in Italy? (My impression is that arranged marriages are still far more common, globally, than the "non-arranged" kind.) But I'd really have to know the story to comment more pertinently, since "arranged" too might cover a range of values of coercion/obligation... I can only say that it strikes me as something that would be unusual rather than usual for Italy, and more unusual for the north than the south, or the rich than the poor--especially in the rigorous, contractual form. Far more common, I think, would be pressure of various kinds placed on one or both parties to accept the candidate preferred by the family.

In any case, I'd be astonished to hear Italian women were entering arranged marriages in significant numbers in the 20th century, at least outside some immigrant or minority groups.

Speaking of Italy, I didn't think I'd do these two books next but they turned out to be fast reads: Twilight in Italy and Etruscan places, both by D. H. Lawrence. The first book concerns trips taken in 1912 and 1913, the second in 1927. I'm not a fan of Lawrence's (more, ahem, a decided anti-fan) but I appreciate a strongly personal, original voice--most writers are so boring... Well, I had read Sea and Sardinia before so thought these would be similar, but Twilight... threw me for a loop with the overdone musings on "blood", "races" (as in nations), Christ, sex, the purported sex war... If I never see the word "phallic" again, as in "phallic consciousness", "phallic worship", phallic this and that up to and including phallus and phalli... it will be too soon. Lawrence writes of men, male relationships, friendships and bondings with such melting love, and in such a contrast with the rage and hatred of his opinions on women, that I can barely comprehend why he bothered to get married (unless she was like a momma to him). Possibly something to do with the importance of procreation, and therefore with heterosexuality as the properly correct, sacred mode of intercourse... or the necessity of proving one's masculinity by dominating women... not that he seems to have managed much of that, poor chap.

In short, in Twilight... Italy and Italians merely serve as springboards for Lawrence's "all about me" psychologising, but if you can put up with that drivel, there's the occasional paragraph on flowers, I guess, some weatherology, outrageously unmoored character studies and suchlike.

This, then, is the secret of Italy's attraction for us, this phallic worship. To the Italian the phallus is the symbol of individual creative immortality, to each man his own Godhead. The child is but the evidence of the Godhead.
   And this is why the Italian is attractive, supple, and beautiful, because he worships the Godhead in the flesh.


There's tons of that, and mighty confusing it gets later on when we learn it's actually the cold dull literal Scandinavians who worship the phallus in the flesh; it's pretty hard keeping tabs on what symbols which "race" venerates at what level of spiritual evolution.

Etruscan places is less chaotic and more observation-bound without, however, leaving any doubt as to Lawrence's general philosophy of life (or that blessed phallic obsession). But, after all, that personal voice and free-ranging intuition, as silly as it occasionally is, is the best reason and more than enough reason to read this book at all.

179thorold
mrt 21, 2019, 6:50 am

>178 LolaWalser: Oh dear, poor old DHL! I can remember buying Etruscan places in the museum shop in Volterra about 20 years ago, and reading it in the intervals of cycling around Tuscany, and I suppose I must have enjoyed it, but it didn’t leave much impression...

180Dilara86
mrt 21, 2019, 9:33 am

À son image by Jérôme Ferrari





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: French
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: Corsica (France), Bosnia



A novel about Corsicans, the Corsican independence front (FLNC), photography, war photography, death, war in general, and the Bosnian war in particular, diffracted through chapters describing a number of photographs, interspersed with chapters named after the parts of the funeral mass said by her godfather and officiating priest for Antonia, a Corsican photographer who did a stint as a war photographer during the Bosnian war. Those describe the life of Antonia and of the men in her life: her godfather, her Corsican independentist boyfriends and Dragan, a Serbian soldier. It’s well-written, and its structure pitches the book at a level that’s slightly challenging, but not overwhelming. For some reason, this novel did not move me very deeply, despite its subject matter. Well, The remote, clinical writing about gruesome war photographs and the fact that we end up knowing a lot more about the men’s feelings than the female central character’s didn’t help.

181Dilara86
mrt 21, 2019, 9:58 am

Le jardinier de Sarajevo (Sarajevo Marlboro) by Miljenko Jergović, translated by Mireille Robin





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Bosnian, Croatian
Original language: Bosnian
Translated into: French
Location: Sarajevo, Bosnia


A forgettable short story collection about wartime Bosnia. There are 29 stories, aiming for a kaleidoscopic picture of Sarajevans, but I can only think of one centred on a woman, which has to be some kind of record. The French translation doesn’t have the most realistic tone, especially in direct speech – too many simple pasts and imperfect subjunctives. Hopefully, the English translation reads better.

182LolaWalser
mrt 21, 2019, 1:36 pm

>179 thorold:

These books are probably more interesting to people retracing Lawrence's steps than to tourists in general. (I can only think of Pessoa's book on Lisbon as an actually useful honest-to-god tourist guidebook--and probably for that very reason utterly uninteresting as a piece of writing.)

>181 Dilara86:

Fwiw, I read that ages ago when it came out and find I remember nothing about it, but as a reader acquainted with Jergovic's non-fiction and various public utterances, I think it would be a great pity if it left you with the impression that he's sexist or something. He's actually the only male writer from those parts I'd say exhibits some feminist consciousness, and almost the only one to champion his female colleagues and counter the general misogyny! (Case in point: just recently, around the International Women's Day, he wrote a column--not for the first time, with more precedents than I can remember--on domestic violence with the title, in translation, "How much do you need to beat your wife for the police to care". Sad to say, such engagement in that environment makes him only a little less strange than a talking penguin would be.)

I think it's notable too that he frequently (maybe most of the time?) centres his novels around female characters, although I can't speak of the content of these books from personal experience.

183librorumamans
mrt 22, 2019, 12:28 am

Concerning the Balkans.

I admire Joe Sacco's work a lot, but I did not have the stomach to make it through his Safe area Goražde. I could feel myself becoming more traumatized with each new page and decided I could not go on.

184lriley
mrt 25, 2019, 9:12 am

Anyway finished Marwa Al-Sabouni's The battle for Home recommended by Lola in #122. Have also started on Sayed Kashua's Dancing Arabs--another of her recommendations. I liked Battle for Home quite a lot. She outlines how a mixed society of Muslims and Christians lived very peacefully together for centuries in her hometown--how corruption and ambition served to undermine all that and the pernicious influence of western nations who when they held power there did not clearly understand the people or their culture and tried to remake Syria in their own image. More unfortunately Western nations see Syria in transactional terms for its resources and are driven by greed and could care less about the culture or the population's relative happiness. There is also a lot about architecture. Marwa had to overcome a lot of hostility to get her PhD. I love the drawings throughout--which by the way are her own.

185LolaWalser
mrt 25, 2019, 12:40 pm

>184 lriley:

Worth noting is that her thesis mentor, who fought so hard for her, was a Christian. They were both there in the city in the middle of the war.

186lriley
mrt 25, 2019, 12:51 pm

#185--yes her mentor kind of goes to some extraordinary lengths. It's really hard for me to understand the hostility towards someone that's that motivated but jealousy and protecting your own person little fiefdom seemed part of it. People like that unfortunately often swim to the top.

187LolaWalser
mrt 25, 2019, 1:11 pm

>186 lriley:

Yeah, I wondered what that whole story is about. I think--and I could be totally wrong, this is pure speculation--that the significance of the major changes in personnel (which is just about the only thing she specifies) is that a contingent of illiberal types replaced the old guard (which, again as she says, was killed or fled). Homs is a majority conservative Sunni city, which is why it became a stronghold of the anti-Assad forces and as such one of the foci of the war. The university was probably one of the few more liberal places in peacetime, with--probably, going here by what friends tell me of unis in Aleppo etc.--a sizeable number of Christians and liberal Muslims.

She says the hostility was not personal (I don't recall her exact phrasing but basically she was saying it wasn't about her as such) which could mean that there was some principle behind it. I can only think, if it wasn't personal enmity, and religion is likely excluded (most Christians had been replaced or left and as a Sunni she's part of the dominant group anyway), what remains is gender.

Which might also explain why she's silent on the religious identity of these people--embarrassing to be helped by a Christian when you're discriminated against by your "own".

But, like I said, I speculate. Maybe they just hated her voice, thought the work was rubbish or something.

188lriley
Bewerkt: mrt 25, 2019, 2:35 pm

Her mentor as you pointed out was Christian and I didn't get the idea there was any animus directed at him--more the idea that they would have liked him to not have pushed them on it--so I didn't get a religious angle either. It could well be a gender problem for the department head---because apparently she crossed some boundary and after that it was anything at all to stop her getting her PhD. There seems to have been a lot of determination on all sides but she eventually she did win out. It would take determination anyway to go through all she did just with mortars and missiles dropping around your head. It has to be terrible and not just for her when the place you grew up in becomes a war zone and I get where she's coming from in the sense that so much has changed about the place I grew up in---though nothing at all near the kind of magnitude of bombs exploding in the street--more just the nature of urban blight or a local economy transitioning to a corporate brand kind of economy. What's happening in Syria though can happen anywhere including here---all that's really needed is the right conditions.

Last year anyway we went out to Northern California for about 10 days to visit my daughter who was working for the US Forestry Service around the area of the Oroville Dam and living in Chico which is down the road from Paradise--maybe 10-15 miles. A month later that small city of 50,000 was practically burned to the ground in a wild fire that ended finally on the outskirts of Chico. We'd seen some of the devastation of those kinds of fires up around Redding on that trip. It was stunning. She's going back to the same job the beginning of May. That is a somewhat natural disaster--though man made in the sense of our activities or lack thereof to climate change. Syria is more much more directly man made and when hatred becomes a component it is like a fire of its own that can burn almost forever. Changing hearts that have seen a lot of pain is a very hard thing to do--that some will try to capitalize on that conflict is going to make it worse. Marwa seems to want to stick it out and if Syria is going to recover they'll need a lot more like her.

189Dilara86
Bewerkt: mrt 26, 2019, 11:54 am

>182 LolaWalser: That's reassuring!




La voix de Papageno (Papageno's voice) by Brahim Metiba





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Algerian
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: Stipra, Haz (fictional places in the Near- or Middle-East reminiscent of Palmyra)


We’re getting to the end of the Mediterranean quarter, and by happy coincidence, La voix de Papageno's epigraph is taken from one of the first works I read for this theme: Palmyra: An Irreplaceable Treasure (Palmyre : L'irremplaçable trésor) by Paul Veyne. La voix de Papageno comes last in Brahim Metiba’s autobiographical trilogy and it is very different from the other two, which were straightforward and grounded in reality. This one is an allegorical, dream-like novel based on Mozart’s Magic Flute, transposed in a place ruled by Islamic State. Papageno is Tamino’s admiring little brother. He loves Tamino’s girlfriend, Nadja, whose father was an archaeologist beheaded by IS. Together, they will have to travel to the temple in Haz. The novel is stylistically close to a prose poem. Reading it requires more effort than his other two books, but it is rewarding. Having a bit of previous knowledge about The Magic Flute, IS and Palmyra is probably not absolutely necessary, but it helps because it gives more depth to the book. At the end is a short discussion between Brahim and his editor, in which he says – among other things – that he identifies with Papageno.

190thorold
Bewerkt: mrt 28, 2019, 10:19 am

I seem to have drifted away from the Mediterranean a bit over the past few weeks, but quite accidentally found myself reading a book by a French/Spanish writer that's set partly in France and partly in Morocco, including a flight over the straits of Gibraltar:

La petite fille qui avait avalé un nuage grand comme la Tour Eiffel (2015) by Romain Puértolas (France, 1975- )

  

Romain Puértolas is yet another French writer of Spanish descent - he seems to have had many jobs, including a spell as an air traffic controller and another as a police officer, and had a YouTube channel debunking illusionists and conjurors (shut down on the insistence of David Copperfield, apparently), before his unexpected success in finding the crossover point between Indian mystics and Swedish furniture with his second novel. This was his third.

Providence, who normally delivers the mail in the Orly district, has promised to go to Morocco to take her chronically-ill adopted daughter from the Marrakesh hospital where she's been since birth and help her to start training for her chosen career as a space-patissière. But it looks as though her hope of keeping her promise is going to be thwarted by an Icelandic volcano that has grounded all flights.

The story of her determined attempt to get to Marrakesh and save little Zahera - as Léo, the air traffic controller, tells it to his barber - is a glorious comic fantasy in the best traditions of Tintin and Saint-Exupéry, with pirates, Tibetan monks, Berber raiders on camels, balloons, and all the rest of it. But then Léo tries to persuade his listener that it was all a fantasy (he cites Boris Vian - "it's true, because I made it all up myself"), and that there is a much more prosaic and sadder explanation behind things. But he refuses to go along with it - Occam's razor is not a tool used in his trade. It looks as though Puértolas might have made him a barber solely to enable this joke, but it's an important one - this turns out to be a book about the healing power of stories, and about how we need the happy-end, even when we know the world doesn't really work that way.

Fun, with a lot of good jokes, but probably not a book you would read more than once.

191LolaWalser
mrt 29, 2019, 9:54 am

>188 lriley:

What's happening in Syria though can happen anywhere including here---all that's really needed is the right conditions.

Yes, exactly.

>189 Dilara86:

Opera connection, how cool.

>190 thorold:

Needs speech bubbles!

I hopped over to Albania and expect to add yet a Greek book before the month is over. Jan and Cora Gordon were a married couple of artists and musicians with, according to Wikipedia, 27 co-authored books, including a "Two vagabonds in..." series. My copy of Two vagabonds in Albania seems to be the first edition published in 1927, based on their trip in 1925. There are many nice drawings large and small scattered throughout the text, black and white plates and a few watercolours. I can't say they are particularly inspiring or insightful writers but a theme like that and of that vintage will always be interesting to some.

They start out of Durazzo (referred to by the Italian name, it's Durrës in Albanian, Drač in Serbian), visit the interior, Tirana, Elbasan, go south as far as Gjinokastro (Gjirokastër, Đirokastra) and north to Scutari (Shkodër, Skadar), with many side expeditions to villages etc. It's not comfortable travelling in the least. Motorways are pretty much inexistent (just a few roads left over by the Austrians and Italians from the war), so a lot of the time they must get on horseback, especially in the hills. Lodgings are iffy at best, food hit or miss, vermin abundant, and if they managed to wash during this time, they don't speak of it.

At the time Albania was barely a few years old as a country and there was no sense of a "nation" among the masses (there weren't, properly speaking, "masses" either, most people existing in a tribal framework), although various parties were trying to drum up nationalistic consciousness hoping that would glue these notoriously clannish, eternally feuding people together. Tough job when illiteracy was almost total, and Albanians more enthusiastic about travelling abroad (notably for work to the US) than within their own country. The lugubrious legacy of the Ottomans would lie on this region longer than anywhere else.

What struck me about this picture is that there is no "society" to speak of, no space where citizens of every class, male and female, can participate in some exchange of views, contacts, communal feeling and business. For one thing, within practically every group women are segregated and almost banned from the public. The Gordons meet one young educated woman, a schoolteacher married to the almost as rare educated man, and even she is monitored and policed by her mother-in-law like a toddler, admonished in public when she sits closer to the strangers than her husband is seated, thus "taking precedence" over her lord and master. And these are Christians.

The Muslims as usual present an even more dire picture. Polygamy is a thing, wife-beating a rule (one man complains that "manners are degenerating" because his seventeen year old son does not beat his seventeen year old wife), women property and beasts of burden.

Over everything lies a suffocating cloud of threats at breaching social conventions, and with so many enmities structural to the situation, one wonders that anyone lives to be thirty.

One safety valve is a rather loose general relationship to religion. Religion matters more as a demarcator, a way to label separate things, than in itself. The Gordons note, as many others did before and since, that Albanians often took a pragmatic view of religion with many people, especially in frontier regions (whether speaking of external, national borders or inter-tribal ones), hedging their bets by giving children both Christian and Muslim names and exercising a sort of ecumenism beautifully exemplified by an old teacher composing a curriculum out of fragments from the Bible and the Qur'an palatable to everyone. Muslims went to churches, Christians to mosques, and everyone celebrated all religious holidays.

Albanians are survivalists above everything else and in this, I think, unique in the Balkans. They alone never had a country before barely a century; hadn't even an alphabet in which to record their language, and they are still the ultimate chameleons eagerly masking their lack of good political PR by assuming whatever nationality, faith, language suits the purpose best. What is the result of a certain kind of weakness turns out to be a singular strength.

192dypaloh
mrt 29, 2019, 5:14 pm

>191 LolaWalser: “one wonders that anyone lives to be thirty.”

Jason Tomes, in his biography of Albania’s pre-WWII King Zog I, writes that “No people in the Balkans was more attached to feuding. On hearing that a man was dead, the normal inquiry in the highlands was not ‘What did he die of?’ but ‘Who killed him?’ In certain valleys, feuds accounted for a quarter of male deaths.”

Yeah, a tough place to make it past 30. Also, on the subject of Albanian women, the custom of “burrnesha” might be of interest, if you don’t already know about it. Not a spoiler to say that it isn’t exactly something to celebrate.

193LolaWalser
mrt 29, 2019, 6:21 pm

>192 dypaloh:

Yes, actually, the Gordons mention coming across one of those, and what attracted their attention was seeing an apparent "lad" sitting down and chatting with women--the only instance of (apparent) male-female social contact they witnessed the entire time they spent in Albania so they took a closer look.

But I wonder if people realise the custom was present in other parts of the Balkans too, notably in Montenegro. They had various names, reflecting some nuances in how they came by their role, but I guess the most common was "virdžina"--at least, that's the name I recall of a movie shot way back... let's see, in 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105761/

One might note--although I'd caution against stereotyping and am not implying any kind of organic links--that there are notable similarities between Montenegrins and Albanians, possibly related to similar environment--highland living, ferociously patriarchal clan organisation, extra-legal honour systems, frequent recourse to banditry and outlaw existence in the face of an oppressor much stronger but generally unwilling to clamber up goat paths. Coincidentally or not, both have also been romanticised by the West more than other Balkan peoples.

194dypaloh
mrt 29, 2019, 10:16 pm

>193 LolaWalser:
The male heir angle of “Virdzina” is interesting. From what I remember reading (and this was in the popular press, so maybe not right), a woman could choose to become a burrnesha. But it wasn't so clear that this would be her idea or more her family saying something like “Eh, not married? Swear to be a burrnesha!” (or else).

If so sworn, the idea was she would live as a man with his freedoms and responsibilities. But, well, she was still a woman, so there were catches. First, she had to swear always to be celibate. Second, if she were to break that vow, death was the punishment.

195LolaWalser
Bewerkt: mrt 31, 2019, 11:19 pm

>194 dypaloh:

I know very little about this topic, but fwiw, my impression is that at least in Montenegro this was imposed on very young girls, almost from birth, not something a woman could choose for herself.

And a Greek book to add to my Mediterranean jaunt, the splendid The third wedding by Costas Taktsis. The thrice-married Nina tells the story of her life and within it also that of her older friend and eventually third mother-in-law, Hecuba. The period covered is roughly from the 1910s (Nina's childhood) through WWII and the German occupation, to post-1945 and the beginning of the civil war.

Nina is educated while Hecuba is not but they are both in similar ways "typical" Greek women, harried to the limit in a series of misfortunes and betrayals wrought on them by a gallery of unbelievably useless, ghastly men. If those aren't secretly gay (Nina's first husband cheats on her on their third wedding night--with her brother), they are impotent or gambling addicts or whore chasers or monstrously ugly or idiots or some combination thereof. Their offspring is usually awful--Nina's gay husband landed her with a daughter who is apparently a wonder of hideousness inside and out--and basically every life is a mini-Greek-tragedy.

This sounds grim but Taktsis has a sense of humour--there's this bit, for instance, which reminded me of Gorey's Gashlycrumb Tinies:

They wanted lots of children to increase the population of Greece so that we could take on the Turks, to win back the Byzantine Empire and achieve the 'Great Idea'; and also for the sheer pleasure of giving them the names of ancient Greeks. They thought this was how they could bridge the gap between ancient and modern Greece. As though the only difference was in the names! However...
Her father's expectations were disappointed. Old Pighi's belly was constantly swollen, but she had difficulty in keeping a child, like some trees which produce a mass of fruit which falls off before it ripens. She either had miscarriages, or the child would die at birth. And even those who survived came to a sticky end. Lycourgos was crushed to death under a cart when a horse bolted. Themistocles trod on a rusty nail and died of tetanus. Ismini committed suicide. Achilles died of consumption. He was the spoiled child of the household. His mother loved him because he was weak and ailing, his father because, of all the boys, he was the only one who showed promise at book-learning, and he dearly wanted one of his sons to become an archaeologist.


I bought this without previous knowledge of it or the author, who, it turns out, was openly gay and neglected in Greece until the English translation of this his only novel brought him some fame. Horrible to relate, Taktsis died murdered in his home in Athens, all of sixty years old. Case never solved. Sad, pitiful Greece; and so adieu to the whole damned stracatafottuto Med.

196SassyLassy
apr 1, 2019, 4:40 pm

ALBANIA

Adding to the Albanian discussion above:



The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson (2011)
first published as Darka e Gabuar 2008
short listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize 2013 (UK)

Nobody combines legend, superstition, and the everyday quite like Ismail Kadare. Book after book has seen him convince the reader to defy reason and belief to follow along with him as he tells his tale. The reader, like the people in his stories, is left wondering "How can it be?", but somehow believing that it could be.

The Fall of the Stone City starts during WWII, in the Albanian city of Gjirokastër. Following the Italian capitulation to Germany in 1943, Italy had ceded her then territory of Albania to Germany. The citizens of Gjirokastër were left pondering the future of their city and country, as the Germans advanced north through Greece toward this, the closest city once they crossed that border.

Remarkably, this concern distracted them from their usual habit of measuring all events against the relative positions of the town's two most famous surgeons: Big Dr Gurameto and Little Dr Gurameto. The two were unrelated and had quite different backgrounds. While Big Dr Gurameto had trained in Germany, "definitely a larger and more formidable country than Italy", Little Dr Gurameto had trained in Italy. The citizens had convinced themselves there must be a rivalry between these two, which could not help but erupt someday. In the meantime, now matter how the citizens weighed the relative appearances, professional conduct, and personal lives of the two, there appeared to be a frustrating equilibrium. Sometimes, as with Germany and Italy, the balance would tilt one way, sometimes the other.

Now, however, the Germans were on the border and the doctors were forgotten. One day a torrent of leaflets fell on the city. Germany merely wanted to pass through Albania as a friend. Albania would be liberated from Italy and granted independence. Kosovo and Camëria would even be within its borders. And so the German advance party moved in peace toward Gjirokastër.

Suddenly, someone fired on it. Hostages were taken, while the music of Strauss poured from the windows of Big Dr G's house. The good doctor was hosting a formal dinner for his great friend from university, Colonel Fritz von Schwabe, commander of the German division and holder of the Iron Cross. By morning, the hostages had been released, and the citizens suddenly remembered that everything must be measured against the fortunes of the two doctors.

Time passed. The Germans retreated, the communists moved in, the Cold War started. The Gurametos' work continued.
As in the old days, one was weighed against the other. This was a hard task because everybody knew that their relative status still depended primarily on the international situation. After its defeat in the war, Germany had been divided into a good part and a bad part, leaving Big Doctor Gurameto roughly neutral. Italy was not as bad as West Germany, but not as good as East Germany, so he and Little Doctor Gurameto were more or less quits. In short, they had emerged from the global upheaval fifty-fifty, as the English say.

But had they? The story of the dinner had taken on supernatural status, for it was associated with "...the appearance of a dead man, who, for the purpose of disguise or some other reason, had put on the greatcoat of a German officer, and in this shape, spattered with mud, had knocked at Dr Gurameto's door"

In authoritarian regimes information twists, distorts and conceals. How the story was revealed to Dr Gurameto, what he believed himself, what the reader has been told, all work together to create something more powerful than facts could ever be.

_______________

This is the seventh work by Kadare I have read. While for me it didn't have the power of the others, that doesn't mean it is a lesser book, for this is one of my favourite authors and none of his books has disappointed. In a way, it sets up the Albanian context for the reader of his novels set in post WWII Albania, tying it into the last paragraph in >191 LolaWalser: above. It also ties back into that constant movement of peoples back and forth along the eastern coast of the Adriatic, so much a part of Mediterranean history.

This is the first of Kadare's books I've read in a direct translation into English from the Albanian; the others had been translated into French first, and then into English. While all the translators read very fluently, for some probably ridiculous reason, I felt this direct translation by Hodgson may have been more true to the original, although the his language may have been a bit more rudimentary. I worried particularly about the simple dichotomy between the doctors, and wondered how another translator would have rendered it.

Then I found this article: http://www.complete-review.com/quarterly/vol6/issue2/bellos.htm and my reservations about translations at a remove have been put to rest.

197lriley
apr 4, 2019, 8:17 am

Moved on from Sayed Kashua's Dancing Arabs which was very good to Dubravka Ugresic's Fording the stream of consciousness. A few months ago Bert Hirsch recommended her to me and seeing her mentioned again here I've finally gotten around to the book I ordered back then. Now Bert recommended another of her books but I'm not sorry about this because the different title I picked up is good enough after 50 or so pages that I'm pretty sure I'm going to put her in my favorites and buy the rest of her translated works.

198LolaWalser
apr 5, 2019, 8:07 pm

>196 SassyLassy:

It's really odd that it took so long for a direct translation from Albanian into English. I guess the interest is low--which makes the occasional example to the contrary, like Francine Prose's My new American life with its brilliant female Albanian protagonist all the more precious.

>197 lriley:

That is great to hear, that's my favourite of her novels. Published before Yugoslavia broke up, it's in a different world, lighter, less sad, than what came after... but of course this is also a matter of reader's perspective. You might appreciate her essays in The culture of lies, for the sort of thing that made her a persona non grata in Tudjman's neofascist Croatia and still a suspect name to bandy around.

199lriley
apr 5, 2019, 10:11 pm

#198--she has her own style, a light humorous touch and absolute control of her material. There's really nothing in the text that is superfluous here. You kind of get that every word, letter and comma has a purpose. Some people are just born to it. So it's been a pleasure to read. The past year I've been reading Virginie Despentes--she's different than Ugresic but has those same qualities (except the touch of humor isn't quite as light).

200LolaWalser
apr 6, 2019, 10:30 am

>199 lriley:

Sounds like a good translation then. That's a relief.