2012 In Review

It’s February already? Perhaps it’s past time for an end of 2012 post, but here’s one anyway. Whether a reader may share in the pleasure I take in looking over what I read last year I can only surmise from my own enjoyment of others’ similar recaps.

In addition to the mysterious internal algorithms that took me from one book to the next, I am indebted to the enthusiasm of other bloggers, who’ve led me to many new discoveries over the past year. I am particularly grateful for having been tipped off to one such work, Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, which came along to offer a glorious, ribald ray of sunshine at an opportune moment. Sparkling with charmingly poor spelling and grammatical errors, Ashford’s 1919 novella manages to make such faults uplifting, as are the unusual turns of phrase and wildly irrational events concocted by the precocious mind of its nine-year-old author. My own nine-year-old goddaughter is now paying the price for Miss Ashford’s 105 pages of audacity: I have impressed upon her that I expect great things – poems, stories, novels, vast epics – and not simply these occasional, anodyne pleasantries hurriedly scribbled on a holiday card.

I began 2012 with There Came a Stranger, by good friend and former children’s book author Louisa Mae Johnston, who dragged out a dusty, decades-old manuscript once rejected by Harlequin Romances for being “too realistic” and reworked it to ratchet up the realism (take that, Harlequin philistines). By setting her romance among central Florida’s destroyed orange groves during a winter freeze, Louisa has created a haunting sense of atmosphere. This is a shameless plug. Buy her book. Born a mere handful of years after Daisy Ashford's book was first published, Louisa is now well along on a third novel, with the second undergoing final edits.

I ended the year with Irmgard Keun’s 1937 novel After Midnight, a surprising perspective on Germany being transformed by Nazism as viewed through the eyes of a young sybarite juggling party preparations and the man problems of her girlfriends against the looming background of encroaching totalitarianism and terrifying injustices. In shorthand, I’ve come to think of the book as Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories meets Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Nothing in the least uncharitable should be inferred from that; this was an unusual and memorable novel.

In between, 2012 provided a wealth of great books. Here, in rough order, are my top 15:

 

Celestina, by Fernando Rojas (Peter Bush, translator)

 

Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens

 

Kaputt, by Curzio Malaparte (Cesare Foligno, translator)

Diary of a Man in Despair, by Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen (Paul Rubens, translator)

All the Names, by José Saramago  (Margaret Jull Costa, translator)

René Leys, by Victor Segalen (J.A. Underwood, translator)

The Queen’s Tiara, by Jonas Love Almqvist (Paul Britten Austin, translator)

 

When the Mountain Fell, by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (Sarah Fisher Scott, translator)

My Struggle, Book One, by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, translator)

 

The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño (Natasha Wimmer, translator)

Ciné-Ville, by Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Marcelle Auclair, translator)

Kyra Kyralina, by Panaït Istrati (Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, translator)

Les couleurs d’infamie, by Albert Cossery

Memoirs of a Revolutionary, by Victor Serge (Peter Sedgwick and George Paizis, translators)

After Midnight, by Irmgard Keun (James Cleugh, translator)

Honorable mentions go to Jerôme Férrari’s Le sermon sur la chute de Rome, Angel Ganivet’s La Conquête du Royaume de Maya, John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing, John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child, the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, Richard Zimler’s The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, Enrique Vila-Matas’ Never Any End to Paris, and a trio of Cesar Aira’s small, delicious bon-bons: The Seamstress and the Wind, Ghosts, and, especially, Les Larmes.

The remarkably few books that I either did not particularly like or that left me indifferent I won’t mention here other than as an affirmation, continuing into 2013, of William Faulkner’s suggestion that we “Read, read, read. Read everything.”

The Queen's Tiara

Gustav III Opera House, Stockholm, ~1880 (Source: Svensk Arkitektur)

Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s 1834 work The Queen’s Tiara (Drottningens Juvelsmycke) - “The Great Swedish Classic” according to the cover of my Arcadia Press edition - ranked easily among the most fascinating books I read in 2012 and among the oddest books I’ve read in any year. Its oddity derives from multiple sources, not least of which is the book’s incorporation of varieties of form. Almqvist called the work a “fugue” – and while calling it a novel seems wholly inadequate, I’ll use the term here for convenience and for my being unable to think of another form capable of containing The Queen’s Tiara’s grab bag of first and third person narration, dramatic dialogue, exchanges of letters, short theatrical vignettes, packages of documents, legal testimonials, songs and narrator’s footnotes that play along the edges where reality meets fiction.

A sort of realist fairy tale arranged in 12 “books,” The Queen’s Tiara is framed by a prologue presenting this compendium of texts as evidence compiled to tell of events surrounding the assassination in 1792 of Sweden’s King Gustav III at a masked ball in the Stockholm opera house. An enigmatic narrator, Richard Furamo, nostalgically recounts his tale to a companion, Herr Hugo, during a discussion of theater at a family dinner decades after the tumultuous period of “duels and double jealousies…of tempests over locks of hair and fires in the heart” in which his story is set. Furamo focuses not so much on the assassination itself – though that scene is vividly related – but on tangential incidents reconstructed following a chance encounter with two mad, bitter sisters confined to a castle where Furamo had lodged one night while traveling. Supplementing his own narrative skills with the documents he has obtained to piece together the sisters’ history, he weaves an extraordinary story.

A summary of the story’s convoluted plot would tax my ability to condense it as well as any reader’s patience with the attempt, but cataloging some of its chief elements may offer a flavor of what’s involved: a conspiracy to assassinate the King; two young sisters, Amanda and Adolphine, and their soldier paramours, Ferdinand and Clas Henrik, both linked to the conspiracy; a case of mistaken identity that shatters the stability of this romantic quadrangle; the masquerade ball attended by all during which the King is mortally wounded; the flight of the conspirators and arrest of the assassin; the theft of a precious, bejeweled royal diadem (the Queen’s tiara of the title); and finally, fully occupying the second half of the book and obliging the sisters to “step aside and become mere walking on parts” in this drama, the emergence of the mysterious young lead character whose improbable name gives The Queen’s Tiara its secondary title: “Azouras Lazuli Tintomara.”

This androgynous, enchanting 17-year-old actor/actress, pursued by all and incapable of loving any, and whose captivating beauty has already fueled speculation about the cause of several impassioned suicides, occupies the innocent heart of The Queen’s Tiara. A creature apart, Tintomara nonetheless appears invariably proximate to the story’s central events: implicated by reckless gossip in the assassination conspiracy; inadvertently responsible for the diadem’s theft; connected intimately to the late King through a complexity of liaisons dangereuses of sex and blood (involving Tintomara’s mother, the King’s homosexuality, and the likelihood that Tintomara is the sibling of the King’s successor, his now thirteen year old son Gustav IV); drawn to the center of a quincunx formed with the sisters and soldiers we’ve met earlier (in one scene actually situated geometrically at the intersection of converging paths on which each of the other four persons approaches Tintomara at the same time, resulting in an explosive dispersal of all); and finally, squeezed by the exigencies of politics between her devotion to the new young king and the nefarious ambitions of the state’s cruel regent.

If all of this sounds absurdly complicated, it is. It is also wondrously imaginative and clever, whipping sexual psychology and political theater into a vortex in which the disruptions generated by the decapitation of state produce an echo - or perhaps a resounding overtone (The Queen’s Tiara is replete with references to music) - in those caused by Tintomara’s ambiguous gender and beguiling beauty. Though The Queen’s Tiara coalesces loosely around historical facts, it wanders far into fanciful realms, in particular by taking Gustav III’s well-known obsession with the stage and the operatic quality of his being assassinated during a masquerade ball and inflating these elements into a riotously theatrical tale with a porous fourth wall. In one of the book’s more memorable scenes, Adolphine, seeking to escape the opera house unnoticed on the night of the assassination attempt, climbs perilously up over the opera set, clinging to its faux treetops and clouds, dislodging a prop lightening bolt that crashes “into the operatic abyss,” and eventually making her way through backrooms and corridors as fantastically labyrinthine as a Piranesi drawing (both interior and exterior architectural descriptions throughout the work possess an exaggerated, chimerical quality). The narrator also occasionally pops in to remind readers that the story is partly his own invention, for example by acknowledging in a footnote the implausibility of this scene with the opera set and urging Herr Hugo, should he ever make the tale public, to enhance its believability by inserting a dangling rope to facilitate Adolphine’s ascent or perhaps a reference to her having taken gymnastics lessons.

I know of nothing quite like this strange, imaginative book, with its melding of historical fact and dramatic fiction, romantic fantasy and hard-edged reality, thriller-like political intrigue and aerial amatory caprices. Its gender-bending main character and the attendant inability of those around her/him to accommodate the mere notion of his/her existence are as canny and original as the tapestry of inventive, nearly baroque conceits Almqvist constantly unfurls, from copper plates depicting inquisitional tortures (used to frighten the imprisoned Tintomara) to an elaborate subterfuge involving a robotic mannequin. Yet far from seeming cultish or marginal in its fantasy elements, The Queen’s Tiara comes across as a classic indeed: a compelling historical novel that pre-figures Freudian psychology and blends Sadean cruelties with the most ethereal romanticism, an oddly moving invocation of the mysteries of human psychological and political processes, and a daringly imaginative caracole around the incestuous intertwining of reality and fiction. It’s also, on top of all that, an enormously entertaining story.  

Diary of a Man in Despair

“…I rack my brains over the perpetual riddle of how this same people which so jealously watched over its rights a few years ago can have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only allows itself to be dominated by the street-corner idlers of yesterday, but actually, the height of shame, is incapable any longer of perceiving its shame for the shame that it is.”

While casting about in October for a work to read for German Literature Month, I abruptly realized I was holding one in my hands, a book I’d first read last winter but had kept close by as a reference - every page seeming to offer a memorable line - and also as a kind of presence I’ve been unwilling to let depart. Frederich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen’s Diary of a Man in Despair (Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten) consists of entries composed between 1936 and 1944 while their author observed, from among Munich’s cultural elite, the perpetrators of Nazism and their devastating impact. Though the catastrophic consequences of Nazism should not by any reckoning remain an unfamiliar story, the prolonged howl of indignation in Diary of a Man in Despair yanks one out of complacent assumptions, and its incisive depth of insight and penetrating far-sightedness give Reck-Malleczewen’s testament a chilling contemporary relevance.

Translator Paul Rubens - with enviable restraint, as this is a book for which additional commentary is likely superfluous - provides but a bare introduction to the author, which I supplemented with other sources to gather a few details. Born to a noble Prussian family, Reck-Malleczewen attended medical school then settled near Munich to pursue a literary career. Due in part to being a respected member of the upper class, he survived the first 10 years of the Reich well-positioned to observe firsthand its architects. He recounts incidental encounters with Goring, Himmler, Goebbels and even Hitler himself, unforgettably described as possessing “a jellylike, slag-gray face, a moonface into which two melancholy jet-black eyes had been set like raisins.” Unable to confine his disgust to his journal, which he carefully buried on his estate after each entry, Reck-Malleczewen also resisted in small public ways - continuing to say “Grüss Gott” (God Bless) instead of “Heil Hitler,” walking out of a theater of nationalists applauding Nazi barbarities – that culminated in a charge of disparaging German purity. Arrested in October 1944, he was executed at Dachau on February 16, 1945. Diary of a Man in Despair appeared in Germany in 1948; Rubens’ translation came out in 1970. New York Review Books will reissue the book this month.

A conservative allied to Germany’s disappearing nobility, Reck-Malleczewen directs much of his outrage at the Nazis’ destruction of class order and social institutions. His conviction in his understanding of the institutional and psychological origins of Nazism, and in the inevitability of its failure, lends Diary of a Man in Despair a similar faith in humanity - despite the horrors perpetrated by its members - as one finds in Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. Taking a Freudian view that things “generally buried in our subconscious” had been brought to the surface as in “the blood-cleansing function of a boil,” Reck-Malleczewen expands his interpretation to indict collusion of government and industry, unrestrained profiteering, indulgence in petty nationalism, and the gullibility of those seeking easy answers, accepting empty promises in a wrecked economy, and attempting to assuage their “own bad consciences by shifting the blame to a single man.” As a writer immersed in the arts, Reck-Malleczewen also implicates writers, composers, and actors who, through their politics and art, colluded with the regime.  Some of his observations embrace elements I’d tacitly associated with Nazism’s rise, such as a zealous sense of order – he instead castigates the Nazis for their rejection of order and “form” - and an eugenic approach to the development of society. It’s jolting to read Reck-Malleczewen assign partial blame to “mass man’s” intervening to allow unhealthy babies to live, thus creating a weakened race.

But despite some controvertible assumptions and a few factual errors, Diary of a Man in Despair takes a long view, employing not only the historian’s backward study but also the visionary’s forward-thinking.  What’s perhaps most sobering about Reck-Malleczewen’s account is how his philosophical clear-sightedness and longitudinal perspective, distilled by circumstance into concentrated brevity, pull back the curtain on the world’s “progress” since the defeat of Nazism, revealing the persistence, little impeded by voices of reason and caution, of many elements he indicts as Nazism’s accomplices. He rails against the free reign of “pirates of industry” who defile valleys, forests and streams with their factories, dams, and “characteristic barbarian inability to understand that some things are irreplaceable.” He warns of corporate influence on government, leading to ”a shallow and irresponsible concentration on one generation, an unheard-of destruction of irreplaceable natural resources, of our cultural and ethical substance – a stockbroker’s philosophy…which blocked out every thought about tomorrow.” He issues a disturbing prediction that “armed might” in the service of private industry would become the way of the world and that “mass man” would be led into “nationalism, with no nation.” He protests the intrusion into science by “patriotism,” anticipates the dispersal of new technologies to masses incapable of or unwilling to understand them, laments the creation of cheap, ersatz products – “without solidity in either materials or execution…appearance, artifice, a patched-on thing, and with it all the deeply ingrained idea of being something special,” and suggests, among other things, that “gasoline…has contributed more to the inner decay of mankind than alcohol.”

In other words, the threats Reck-Malleczewen describes remain recognizable and present. His diary permits us no distancing from Nazism, but demands that we view it in relation to ourselves and charges us to remain vigilant. Acutely conscious of having been stripped of everything but his role as witness, Reck-Malleczewen, in leaving us this small, profound, essential book, took the “one last chance given to one in this life, the chance to affirm the truth with one’s death.”

Miklós Bánffy: To the Moon

Miklós Bánffy

The Moon

French conceptual artist Sophie Calle once passed a night in a bed installed at the top of the Eiffel Tower, inviting members of the public to tell her bedtime stories to keep her awake. Asked later how she managed to convince authorities to let her spend a night in a bed at the top of the Eiffel Tower, she replied, awestruck by her own good fortune, “I asked for the moon and I got it.”

I felt a bit like Sophie Calle upon discovering recently some news about Miklós Bánffy’s “Transylvania Trilogy” – They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, and They Were Divided. Long-time readers of this blog may know that my enthusiasm for this set of novels is the reason I began book-blogging in the first place. Unfortunately, the books have not been particularly easy to find, and I’ve heard from several readers that the cost of used copies – especially the first volume – is often prohibitive (at least for print editions; the books are now available for Kindle download).

Arcadia Books, the British publisher originally responsible for putting out the trilogy, re-released new trade paperback versions of the books in Great Britain in early 2010, but these new editions quickly seemed to become nearly as expensive and difficult to find as the originals. But Gary Pulsifer of Arcadia had also launched a campaign to generate publisher interest outside of Britain, and, in an effort to further that cause, I followed up some correspondence with him by writing to the agency handling international rights to the books, expressing my hope of one day seeing them in hardcover, perhaps in a well-known collection such as Everyman’s Library.

I’m not about to claim credit, but I’m nonetheless delighted to announce that I seem to have received the moon: Bánffy’s Transylvania Trilogy will in fact be published by Everyman’s Library this coming July. The books will come in a standard Everyman’s Library hardcover edition in two volumes (with the shorter second and third books of the trilogy bound together).

In the unlikely event that I did have something to do with this excellent news about the Bánffy trilogy, I'll keep up my baying at the moon by offering up a few more works/authors I’d to see published or re-published in English translation. Some have been available in English before and are now out of print, some I’ve found only in French (listed below with their French titles), and my interest in others has been piqued by suggestions from various book bloggers and reviewers.

The Dying Lion and Milolo, by Miklós Bánffy - Hungarian

Grande Sertão Veredas, by João Guimarães Rosa - Portuguese

Amrikanli: Un automne à San Francisco, by Sonallah Ibrahim – Arabic

Astronautilia : Hvezdoplavba, by Jan Křesadlo – Greek & Czech

Gravelarks, by Jan Křesadlo - Czech

La fôret des renards pendus, by Arto Paasilinna (and others – so few have appeared in English) - Finnish

L’Art de la joie, by Goliarda Sapienza - Italian

Congo, by David Reybrouck - Dutch

A World Without Maps, by Abdul Rahman Munif & Jabra Ibrahim Jabra – Arabic

Portrait of Lozana, the Lusty Andalusian Woman, by Francisco Delicado - Spanish

The Peasants, by Wladyslaw Reymont - Polish

Monday Starts on Saturday, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (the “unauthorized” translation by Leonid Renen) - Russian

Perrudja, by Hans Henny Jahnn - German

La Petite Pièce Hexagonale, and Parfum de Glace, by Yoko Ogawa (though some of Ogawa’s works are available in English, these two – my favorites of the several I’ve read in French – are not) - Japanese

Tales of Spring Rain, by Uyeda Akinari (the companion volume to Akinari’s wonderful 18^th century collection of Japanese gothic stories, Tales of Moonlight and Rain) - Japanese

Ri Koran watakushi no hansei (Half of My Life as Ri Koran), by Yoshiko Otaka a.k.a. Ri Koran a.k.a. Li Xiangjian a.k.a. Yoshiko Yamaguchi a.k.a. Shirley Yamaguchi - Japanese

Other authors un- or under-translated into English:

Joseph Kessel - French

Manuel Mujica Láinez – Spanish

Ramón Gómez de la Serna – Spanish

Panaït Istrati* – French

Julio Ramón Ribeyro* – Spanish

Angel Ganivet* – Spanish

Albert Londres - French

Max Mohr - German

Serge Filippini - French

Albert Cossery - French

Simon Vestdijk - Dutch

Eduard von Keyserling - German

Sergio Pitol – Spanish

Carlos Drummond de Andrade – Portuguese

There are certainly hundreds and even thousands more. I’d be most interested in others’ suggestions, so please offer up your own nominees in the comments.

           

*Translator John Penuel has been addressing the works of these three writers; some of his translations have been published in print editions and/or are available for Kindle download.

Back Soon

Visitors to this blog may have noticed a lengthy silence, for which I apologize. An unexpected personal loss has kept me away. I will be returning shortly. In the meantime, my best wishes to all for a healthy and happy new year filled with literary discovery.

                                                                                      M. Price - Writing in Tongues, 2010

  

The End of All Men

Photo: NASA

In continuing to explore C.-F. Ramuz, I turned to an earlier novel with a later, greater theme, again succinctly contained in its title: The End of All Men. If When the Mountain Fell had, in its treatment of a particular calamity, provided an oblique but chillingly portentous and powerful suggestion of the cataclysm of Nazism and war about to engulf Europe, then The End of All Men should frighten the hell out of contemporary readers: its subject is the unstoppable warming of the world. Though the novel was written in 1927, there has probably been no other work since that has so effectively and devastatingly painted a picture of the catastrophe of climate change.

Of course, Ramuz in 1927 was hardly addressing human-made warming of the planet. As in When the Mountain Fell, Ramuz melds Christian allegory and natural forces, here the prediction in Revelations of the destruction of the world by fire, and inspired, as we infer from the dedication, by a torrid summer in which it seemed the world would never stop getting hotter. His plainspoken vision of such an end to the earth has little to do with today’s complex scientific projections of the interacting mechanisms of warming with which we’re now familiar: the terrifying myriad of potential attendant consequences ranging from rising sea levels to disastrous weather, from disruptions in food supply to release of gases trapped in frozen tundra, from eruptions of disease to cascading ecological effects stemming from alterations in species vitality and survival. Scientists intent on communicating their alarm might learn from Ramuz, as what appears to be a trademark Ramuz ability to convey ideas grandly but in simply understandable terms makes The End of All Men as straightforward and easy to grasp as a Biblical parable.

Simply put, something has occurred, some perturbation of the earth that sends it slowly spiraling closer to the sun, with the temperature rising gradually each day. The first wave of hot days and the first rumors of something wrong get shrugged off:

There is a slight beginning of nothing here, without any outward sign. In the beginning the inventor of the idea is all alone with his idea. The arriving news gets a reception only of inattention and smiles.

Denial gives way to fear, then to panic, desperation, and violence. The strategies for dealing with the heat grow increasingly frantic. Riots break out. Refugees pile onto ships headed for the poles, only to be repulsed by icebergs splintered from the icecaps. In ever-shrinking lakes, people seek solace in whatever coolness remains in whatever water remains. Finding relief in no cardinal direction, others look vertically and head for the high mountains, for what would a Ramuz novel be without the Swiss Alps?

Like When the Mountain Fell, The End of All Men is set near Lake Geneva in French-speaking Switzerland. Ramuz displays a remarkable ability to be both regional and universal, to move seamlessly from the particular to the general. Large portions of The End of All Men could be lifted out of context and understood in any setting, as though Ramuz has found a way to some “ur” essence of phenomena. Even concrete and precise descriptions appeal to a commonality of experience, as when Ramuz juggles singular and plural in describing the discomfort of attempting to sleep in the heat:

That night the stars were too many and too white. Everybody remains merely questioning; everything is stopped. Everywhere, they lie naked on their beds; they toss from left to right, seeking a place for their head. Naked, having taken off their uncomfortable shirts, but there is that other discomfort which is in the air, and which is the atmosphere. Every man argues for himself – continually repelling something he would like to push aside, and it is himself, his own skin, as he is made, the very threat he is to himself; pushing it with each hand, with the two feet, by slow or abrupt movements.

Stylistically, The End of All Men is more experimental than When the Mountain Fell, more a prose poem than novel, a meditation on death, on human interactions in face of calamity, on moral choices when faced with mortality, on communal choices when faced with doom. Characters have no time to develop – rather, anyone given a name in the novel merely seems to detach from the masses for a brief, distinct moment, a brief act, then disappears, a moth in a flame. And yet the cadence of Ramuz’s language, his moving, gentle and even forgiving portrayal of human beings faced with apocalypse, convey an ultimate faith in human dignity, in effort, in life being worth living. The powerful ending of The End of All Men seems to anticipate as its deceptively reassuring philosophical core those lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” that “the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time” –  rather cold comfort for a world reduced to ashes. 

When The Mountain Fell

"Derborence, by C. F. Ramuz" - photograph by Pierre Sottas, used by permission. 

More of M. Sottas' photos may be viewed here. 

At a book sale last week I picked up a novel on impulse, having never heard of its author, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and drawn by its curious title, When the Mountain Fell. Given that title, a blurb on the jacket from French dramatist Paul Claudel calling the book “one of the summits of French prose” both piqued my interest and caused one of my irony receptors to flash for an irreverent moment. Having now read When the Mountain Fell, and putting aside its being in translation rather than in its original 1935 French incarnation, Derborence, I’m inclined to trust that Claudel’s statement is no exaggeration. At home late that night, I opened the book expecting to have a quick look; two hours later I emerged from this exquisite novel as though from a trance. Ramuz’s captivating narrative style is completely compelling; his descriptions of the Swiss Alps in which his story unfolds are ravishing; his grasp of the ways people grapple with disaster displays a profound sensitivity and understanding; the ending of the novel still rings in my mind days later with a precise, poignant, crystalline beauty.

As a title, When the Mountain Fell, even if it’s not Ramuz’s own, sums up the novel succinctly. This is a simple story of catastrophe and human response to it, based on an actual event, a colossal landslide in the early 18^th century in Derborence, in the French-speaking corner of Switzerland near the source of the Rhône, which brought half of a mountain down onto the scattered seasonal cabins of herders who had taken their livestock up to a mountain meadow to graze. The resulting rock field dammed a stream and created a lake, spread debris for a distance of five and half kilometers, and buried the area in rock to a depth estimated at 100 meters.

Ramuz focuses on the human element of this catastrophe, the actions and reactions of the valley’s citizens across a wide psychological spectrum, from resigned acceptance to abject grief to madness, relating the landslide’s impact on individual lives as well as on the community of the valley and beyond. His characters, simple country people, employ a laconic, pared-down language that captures the essentiality of rural life, as in the relationship between Antoine and Therese, the young newlyweds at the novel’s center:

He said, “hello”; she said, “hello.” He said “Well now…,” she said,” You see, it’s like this.” They had to meet far from the village, because there were always busybodies around.

This economy of language that leaves a world of things unsaid remains unchanged even in the face of disaster, as when men from neighboring villages and even from the German-speaking side of the range converge on the site of the collapsed mountain:

­­They came. They said nothing at first. They came and said nothing. They looked at the people from Zamperon who said nothing either. Then they nodded their heads slowly.

            And they said, “Well?”

The people from Zamperon said, “Yes,” and nodded their heads.

But the ostensible simplicity of When the Mountain Fell masks far more complexity than appears on its surface. Ramuz’s sentences are short. His paragraphs are short. What he does within such constraints can be quietly dazzling. Frequently, perspective shifts subtly between observer and observed, as when Therese, while a storm rages outside, sits dazed within her home, grappling with a ghostly vision she’s had of her husband, a scene we see from her eyes and, a split second later, as though eyes have turned to look at her:

The lightening flashed again. Suddenly there was a window opposite her in the kitchen wall, then it was no longer there.

A blinding white square, it sprang into being, vanished, flashed out again, and with it Therese too was first brilliantly lighted, then swallowed up in darkness , then lighted up again.

Ramuz’s sentences perform similar acrobatics in delicately flipping perspective between interior thought and exterior phenomena, or in juxtaposing elements that suggest, in the wake of the calamity, consciousnesses struggling between extremes of belief and disbelief, between profound anguish and the irreverent indifference of particular material things latched onto in the mind’s desperate grasp for solidity and succor. At times Ramuz replays, “Rashoman” style, an entire scene as viewed first from one character’s perspective then from another’s, even aligning this along a back and forth tension between the buried meadow up the mountain and the women, children and elderly men left in the village below. Perspective looks up the mountain then back down, as though strung along an invisible cord binding the village to the disaster which has taken so many of the town’s most vital men, as though to emphasize the empathic ways in which the living ache for the dead, longing to identify, whether out of grief or hope, or out of both, with those they love, with those they have lost.

The tremendous sense of loss is amplified and thrown into sharp relief through Ramuz’s contrasting, rapturous descriptions of the natural world. Beyond and above the sharp, cruel rocks, everything seems divinely luminous and alive:

It was as if they were standing at the bottom of a well, except that the steep walls were fissured from top to bottom by narrow gorges, each with is tiny waterfall hanging in a wavering white line. Their gaze swept evenly around the rim, then halted where Serpahin’s forefinger still pointed at the sky.

It was up there right on the edge of the parapet at its highest point. Just there the rock jutted out into space, and towering along its whole width was the rim of the glacier. Something up there was shining softly: a luminous fringe, faintly transparent, with gleams of blue and green and a sheen like phosphorescence – it was the broken edge of the ice, and in that enchanted hour of the night it too was filled with infinite silence and infinite peace. Nothing stirred anywhere under the impalpable white down of moonlight which seemed to drift effortlessly on the night air and settle in thin sheets on every smooth surface.

When the Mountain Fell contains a few elements of what in less adept hands I’d be tempted to call “Christian kitsch” – Bible beams breaking through clefts in cliffs and clouds to illuminate polished crosses, symbolic incarnations of good and evil, suggestions of Christian allegory. But what Ramuz accomplishes, almost miraculously, is simply and seamlessly to bring the reader inside the religiosity of the community he describes, conveying how belief - or incredulity - can shape and constitute perception of reality. Rather than imposing a theological vision, Ramuz simultaneously keeps us outside as observers and inside as participants in the community’s small, sincere rituals and gestures of faith, which have a particular poignancy in the world he creates around his good people, a world actually at odds with a reassuring God and where faith is, almost literally, teetering on an abyss. On the surface When the Mountain Fell may appear an anachronism, out of step literarily with a decade that gave birth to works of such striking modernism as Celine’s Journey to the End of Night, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Yet Ramuz’s story contains, in addition to its subtle, controlled experiments with syntax and perspective, a canny questioning of perception itself – throughout his novel there’s a delicate infusion of dreams, hallucinations, visions, and superstitions capable of altering reality – but above all a deep sense of existential indeterminacy and of the indefinite and indefinable. A simple description of a precipice along a mountain path contains all the power of an existential void:

And suddenly the ground falls away from beneath your feet.

All at once the line of grass against the sky, which dips slightly in the middle, is outlining its hollow curve over nothingness itself. You have arrived. A chasm opens abruptly below you, like an immense oval basket with precipitous sides over which you have to lean, because although you are yourself six thousand feet up, the bottom is seventeen or eighteen hundred feet below you, straight down.

You bend over, you lean your head forward a little. Or else lie down flat, and look over the edge into the depths.           

A breath of cold air blows into your face.

In like manner, even the descriptions of the rock field - “stones, and more stones, and still more stones” - come across as both literal and conceptual, a “waste land” at once geological and as existential as the one that gave a title to T. S. Eliot's poem. Everything in When the Mountain Fell works to suggest a grandeur of existence far beyond the intimacy of the place and time; Ramuz's story could take place as easily in 1935 as in the early 18^th century. This lends When the Mountain Fell an eternal, allegorical quality, and, in the context of when it was written, a deeply sensitive prescience. If the minimalist speech of the mountain people carries within it a world of meaning and understanding, then so does Ramuz’s ostensibly simple narrative. For such a small book, it seems vast and echoing, radiating out from that instant of catastrophe as though touching all the world’s catastrophes. And, though the calamitous events in a small, peaceful, Swiss mountain village in the 18^th century seem at first far removed from the tumultuous period in which When the Mountain Fell was written, no other novel I’ve read from the time has seemed to communicate so profoundly an anticipation of the imminent catastrophe facing 1930's Europe, of the mountain about to fall on it.

Antonio Tabucchi Week: Piazza d'Italia

Antonio Tabucchi’s first novel, Piazza d’Italia (1975), paints a family portrait spanning nearly one hundred years of Italian history, from the country’s unification under Garibaldi through its early birth pangs, expanding colonial empire, passage through World War I, losses to emigration and influenza, Fascism, World War II, and finally its post-war emergence as a democratic republic, a vast historical panorama of a nation and family buffeted by the waves of great historical events, rendered in sumptuous detail with a penetrating, granular examination of every facet of Italian life, a sweeping depiction, extending nearly 200 pages, of-…

Okay, so I made up all that stuff about granular examination and sumptuous detail. This is, after all, Antonio Tabucchi, not some 19^th century novelist who wouldn’t have dreamed of compacting so much time into so few pages. But there’s something winsome about Tabucchi’s restrained yet imaginative and engaging attempt to do this, and, as his first novel, Piazza d’Italia also sows some grains for what would emerge in his subsequent works. That Tabucchi choose to divide Piazza d’Italia into three sections – the “restored” subtitle of the 1993 French re-issue I read is “A Popular Tale in Three Times” - may suggest his own sense of the unwieldiness of the narrative’s temporal compression.

Piazza d’Italia’s “Three Times” correspond roughly to three generations of one libertarian, left-leaning family, whose surname is never provided as though to emphasize their representational aspect. The first section tells of a veteran of Garibaldi’s campaigns, the soldier Plinio (the names of many characters in Piazza Italia echo through Italian history, and the tradition of naming children after historical figures gets an amusing treatment when a misprint on a poster results in several children being named “Imberto” instead of “Umberto”). Plinio and his wife Esterina produce two sets of twins, one identical (the brothers Quarto and Volturno) and one fraternal (brother Garibaldo and sister Anita).  Hints of Tabucchi’s later manifestations of interest in the vagaries of identity are evident here, since not only do the twins allude to Italy’s origins in the Romulus and Remus myth and suggest continuity through time, but they also serve as a concatenation of identities within the family. Adding to this concentrate are multiple iterations of the name Garibaldo, including when the town hall denies Plinio his initial wish to name each of the identical twins Garibaldo, or a generation later when their brother Garibaldo’s son, yet another Volturno, discards his own name and adopts that of his father (there’s an indispensible family tree provided in an appendix). Moving gingerly from one generation to the next, Piazza d’Italia traverses Italian history, its events filtered through the Tuscan village of Borgo and marked in the town piazza by the serial replacement of the statue at its center to reflect whichever political figure is most popular at the time. The town’s first cinema also comes to play a starring role in marking later historical events, its ostensible function loaned out for speeches, rallies, and other gatherings having nothing to do with cinema, causing the poor population to wait repeatedly in vain for Giovanni Pastrone’s epic nationalist film Cabiria to finally reach the town. While the family’s men go off to fight or emigrate to the Americas or stay to combat fascism or drift into the deserts of Africa, its fierce and smart women form the moral center of Piazza d’Italia and play as active a political role, albeit often behind the scenes, as their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons. Some of the references to Italian particulars may be lost on non-Italian readers (just as Pereira Maintains, despite its setting in Salazar’s Portugal, was read by many in Italy as a warning of resurgent fascism under Berlusconi), but at least for historical background, endnotes help fill gaps in the reader’s knowledge.

Tabucchi’s preface to the reissue of Piazza d’Italia contains an admission that it’s the novel with which he realized he wanted to be a writer, as well as a melancholic, Tabucchi-esque musing on the identify of that other, younger Tabucchi who wrote it. For those familiar with Tabucchi’s work, Piazza d’Italia may seem almost quaint, and only hints at what makes his later works so notable, with their dreams and hallucinations, rich literary and cultural references, surprising shifts of identity and clever, meta-fictional conceits that display Tabucchi’s well-known obsession with Fernando Pessoa (those later works also demonstrate significantly pared-down historical scope, as though Tabucchi realized that beyond mere historical measure, an even greater expansiveness might be attained by exploring the multiplicities within an individual’s identity). Tabucchi gives us, in Piazza d’Italia, something more akin to Gabriel Garcia Marquez than to Pessoa, a linear history of three generations of a family set in a small town not unlike Macondo and told through anecdote and vignette, with a few lexical games, such as when the second generation children all refer to one another by their names spelled backwards, and sprinklings of magical and surreal elements, as when the town’s windows all loose themselves from their casements and, flapping their shutters, take to the sky. For me, the setting and period also call to mind Federico Fellini’s film “Amarcord,” with its similar intimacy, gentle humor, great humanism, and sense of distant events sending ripples through a small town, altering it temporarily yet lending it the aspect of some eternal witness. But the beginnings of Tabucchi’s later directions are evident in the confusion of identities, the historical repetitions and caprices of time, the determined, explicit political stance (perhaps because of Tabucchi’s strong opposition to fascism even in his own time, the novel’s scenes during Mussolini’s rule possess a particularly acute power), and above all, Tabucchi’s humor and playfulness, delight with language, confidence and clarity, and warmth of spirit. In other words, Piazza d’Italia is not a bad place to start for a great writer, or for those interested in getting to know him.

I read Piazza d’Italia for Antonio Tabucchi Week, graciously hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat.