Interlude in French

I recently sped through three novels written in French during the past 10 years and offer below some brief reactions and comments (any translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own):

Faire L’Amour (Making Love) by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (2002)

(an English translation by Linda Coverdale is available from the Dalkey Archive, and I've borrowed her translation of the title)

Belgian writer Toussaint has been on my radar screen for sometime. I seem to run across his books everywhere (nearly all of his work has been published in English, most of it by the Dalkey Archive), and my general sense from the little I know about him is that he’s one of the more respected young francophone writers. In Faire L’Amour, a novel about the dissolution of a love affair (and apparently the first of what’s come to be known as Toussaint’s “Marie” trilogy), one knows from the first line that something is far from right:

“I had had a vial filled with hydrochloric acid and I kept it on me at all times, with the idea of one day throwing it into someone’s face. “

This shocking initial note of potential violence serves as the high-tension wire on which the action of Faire L’Amour is strung. Or perhaps I should say the lack of action, since the novel’s two main characters seem paralyzed in self-absorption, entrenched in banalities, and – though aware their relationship has come to an end – remain mired in a passive attraction/repulsion as though some tacky, gooey substance keeps them from separating entirely. The first part of the novel unfolds over a single long winter night in Tokyo, where the couple have just arrived from Paris, jet-lagged and emotionally drained from the awareness of their impending dissolution. More alone than together even when together, the couple sleepwalks through the disorienting nightscape of Tokyo (the novel shares the insomniac atmosphere of Sophia Coppola’s film “Lost in Translation” as well as its view of Tokyo as alternately mesmerizing and estranging). Meanwhile, a series of earthquakes and aftershocks underscores the upheaval and fracturing of the characters’ personal lives. Toussaint’s taut, crystalline composition has the precision of an engineer, like something built by a hardware designer. This self-consciousness of style is enhanced by Toussaint’s having captured a sense of a generation for whom the world has shrunk, where connection by technology is a given but actual communication is not, leaving them adrift and passive in a cold and blinking electronic night while the trembling earth beneath them warns of the threat that everything could disappear in an instant.

La Porte des Enfers (The Gate to the Kingdom of the Dead*), by Laurent Gaudé (2008) (not yet translated into English) (*“Enfer,” the French word for “hell,” is distinct from the plural “enfers,” which specifically denotes Hades, the mythological underworld of the dead)

I’d never before heard of Prix-Goncourt-winning author Laurent Gaudé (nor had the person who gave me this book, who bought it entirely based on the cover blurb). The novel takes place in Naples; chapters alternate between 1980 (the year of a massive earthquake in the region) and 2002. From early in the novel, in which a six-year old boy is killed during a gun battle between rival gangs, Gaudé’s Naples is easily recognizable as that of Roberto Saviano’s gritty and gruesome piece of investigative journalism, Gomorrah. However, the novel takes an unexpectedly supernatural turn when the boy’s father is haphazardly thrown together with a transsexual prostitute, a street-wise bartender, a radical, elderly priest, and a drunken mystic who claims to have found an entry into the underworld – and thus a means for the father to venture into hell in search of his son. While such a histrionic plot sounds like it might be easily lend itself more to popular, mass-market fiction, Gaudé is a highly talented writer, and La Porte des Enfers becomes a serious mediation on the intersection of life and death, a new iteration of both the Orpheus myth and Dante’s “Inferno” (in a brief afterword Gaudé states that he wrote the novel to memorialize “my dead” – his friends and family members who’ve passed on). His sensitive, completely unsentimental depiction of the parents’ obliterating grief and rage is raw and grueling. Mixing history and myth, Gaudé offers up a number of fascinating accounts of attempts by the living to interact with the dead and, most effectively, of the myriad ways the living can be more dead than alive. His realism immerses one in the streets of Naples to the point where one can follow much of the action using Google Maps (this may well be the first time an alleged door to the underworld can actually be located using Google Street View). While I admired Gaudé’s talent – one can’t help but appreciate the hell he must have descended into in order to write La Porte des Enfers and his gesture of memorial - I can’t say that I loved his novel. Several scenes of violence struck me as entirely gratuitous, and above all, I found distasteful the unmeditated vengeance fantasy aspect of the novel (vengeance being my least favorite theme).

L’Échappée Belle (Beautiful Escape*), by Anna Gavalda (serialized 2001; revised by the author and published in book form 2009) (An English translation by Alison Anderson – French Leave - is forthcoming in April 2011 from Europa Editions) (*”L’Échappée Belle” literally means “the beautiful escape,” but also has a relevant idiomatic meaning in French of “a close call” or “close shave.” “Échappées Belles” is also the title of a popular French television series about pleasant travel destinations).

Of these three works in French, the one I least expected to like was also the one I enjoyed the most. I’d never given much thought to reading Anna Gavalda; I’d seen her books for sale in airports and train stations, and assumed they were probably slight, sentimental, commercial novels. My bad. In L’Échappée Belle, I discovered a greatly talented writer whose humor subverted expectations by being marked by what seems to me the rarest of elements in contemporary French literature: joy. The story of L’Échappée Belle is simple: three adult siblings brought together at a marriage none wishes to attend decide to skip out of the ceremony entirely and track down their fourth sibling for a stolen weekend of reconnection and recreation (quite literally, a “re-creation” of the childhood relations they shared). Gavalda’s characters are memorable, her writing clear and sophisticated. I remarked to a friend that L’Échappée Belle seemed to employ a much wider vocabulary than most contemporary French novels I’d read, as I seemed to be spending an unusual amount of time with the dictionary. The friend said she’d once seen Gavalda interviewed on television and was struck not only by her affability and modesty, but also by her rather bashful revelation that she could write anywhere - so long as she had a thesaurus with her. Gavalda reminds me a bit of Ann Tyler, but with a wit and political astuteness that moves her perhaps closer to Margaret Atwood. Of these three French language novels, Gavalda’s "beautiful escape" is, ironically perhaps, the only one of the three not to escape off to an international setting and the only one to acknowledge, even tacitly, actual political issues unfolding today in France. Jean-Philippe Toussaint may be better at characterizing the emotional gestalt of our times, but Gavalda, in one brief passage of L’Échappée Belle, questions and captures beautifully the frustration of a generation’s docile failure to confront reactionism with the force of indignation rooted in the openness, sensitivity and social concern to which many have consecrated their entire lives (I thought of this scene – in which the narrator recounts her regret at having let a bigoted remark about immigrants go unchallenged – while reading “Indignez-Vous!,” the 30-page call to indignation published this past December by 93-year old former Resistance fighter and diplomat Stéphane Hessel – a pamphlet that has become an overnight sensation in France and has sold nearly a million copies). My only disappointment in L’Échappée Belle is an embarrassingly petty and entirely personal one: Gavalda's inclusion of yet another example of what I can’t help thinking of as the “Mondo Cane syndrome” - that common coping response, when faced with an overwhelmingly incomprehensible, chaotic, and hostile world, of simply acquiring a dog. But I’m hardly one to criticize; we all have our escapes and means of coping (some of us have even opted to respond to the difficulties of the world by submerging ourselves in novels). Fortunately, L’Échappée Belle reminds all of us escapees that escape and denial are not the same thing, and that escape – particularly when stolen from the confines of hollow obligation and conservative social strictures – can be beautiful.   

Late Night Thoughts After Reading Edith Grossman's "Why Translation Matters"

Only when fortuitous personal circumstances essentially forced me to become serious about learning French did I realize the many splendid paths that knowing a second language would open, not least of which was the one that led into literature in French. I began to discover a number of wonderful writers previously unknown to me: Jean Giono, Boris Vian, Albert Londres, Daniel Pennac, Patrick Modiano, François Cheng, Amélie Nothomb, J. M. G. LeClézio, Emmanuel Carrère, and numerous others from the francophone world beyond France, such as Belgium’s Henry Bauchau and Morocco’s Tahar Ben Jalloun.

An even greater revelation, however, was in learning of many authors from around the world whose works had been translated into French but were difficult or impossible to find in English. While the paucity of translated literature published in the United States each year has earned it notoriety as the “three percent” problem, France – with a strong and respected tradition of translation, weighs in with a percentage closer to 20%. My knowledge of French meant that I suddenly had access to a vast new source of literature translated from other languages. An entire world opened before me as I began to find writers from Japan, Scandinavia, Italy, Greece, the Middle East, China, and many other places around the globe whose work simply wasn’t available in English, or available in only highly limited selections. It was thus, for example, that I had my first exposure to a young South American writer named Roberto Bolaño, whose Étoile Distante I picked up in French after reading an article about him and being surprised to find none of his work in English (nearly a year later, By Night in Chile would be the first Bolaño work to arrive in English translation).

Below I highlight several works I read in French and wished to see translated into English. To date, only one of these works has appeared in English; the others wait too patiently for someone to take up the task. (Translations of the titles are my own; my apologies to more adept translators who may certainly quibble with my amateur choices):

Un Roi Sans Divertissement, by Jean Giono (France)

(A King Without Diversions)

Originally in French; untranslated into English

Jean Giono occupies a place in French literature that merits him the widest possible readership. North Point Press issued several of his works in the United States in the 1980’s, and readers may be aware of him through the perennial gift book for the gardener in the family, The Man Who Planted Trees, or perhaps from the 1995 film “The Horseman on the Roof” based on one of his best-known novels, but Giono’s work still remains in woefully limited availability in English. His rapturous novels of life in the French countryside mesh spiritual and moral questions with the marvels of the natural world. His 1947 novel Un Roi Sans Divertissement - perhaps the highlight of my reading year when I read it in 2007 –dates from Giono’s late period, technically the first in an ambitious projected cycle of novels meant to encompass the human condition. Divided into three linked tales and stretched over five years in the life of police captain Langlois, Un Roi Sans Divertissement takes place in a remote area of Isère in southeastern France, though Giono quite explicitly asserted that the geography of these works of his late career was a fictional creation. The first section follows the search for a serial killer in an isolated, snowbound rural area – an unusual topic for Giono, to say the least. There’s some suggestion of a pot-boiler aspect to the novel, apparently intended to attract American publishers, but there’s no attendant deficiency in the quality of the literature. Un Roi Sans Divertissement contains perhaps the most exquisite descriptions of autumn and winter I’ve ever read. Readers from the English-speaking world would do well to flock to the streets to protest the lack of a translation.

Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky (France)

(Suite Française – it can’t be improved upon with a translated title)

Originally in French; English translation by Sandra Smith published in 2006

By now the world has discovered Némirovsky and, more significantly, begun to give her work its proper due. Suite Française, her major work, now appears in English even in an Everyman’s Library edition and consists of two linked novellas (of five interrelated novellas Némirovsky planned, she only completed these two prior to her arrest and subsequent execution in Auschwitz). Hundreds of works of literature wrestle with the horrors of World War II and the world’s having allowed Nazism to emerge, and while many are exceptionally powerful works, none that I’ve read has quite captured, as Némirovsky has, the quiet, docile manner by which ordinary people acquiesced to fascism. This is not a novel of the camps or of the battlefield; its focus on ordinary persons allows it to transcend the specifics of WWII fascism in France to serve as a potent warning of the ease with which people can go along and end up complicit with the most heinous of fascist atrocities.

Amrikanli: Un Automne à San Francisco, by Sonallah Ibrahim (Egypt)  

(Amrikanli: An Autumn in San Francisco)

French translation from Arabic by Richard Jacquemond; untranslated into English

If there were one work I read in French that might serve as the poster child of the “three percent” problem, it’s this 2003 novel from Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim (published in French translation in November, 2005). I could argue that some other works on this list may be more deserving, but the sheer inconceivability of the lack of an English translation is unmatched, given Amrikanli’s American setting (San Francisco) and its thematic treatment of the collision of Middle Eastern and American cultures in the contemporary world. Ibrahim is routinely viewed as one of Egypt’s most significant writers. Shortly after Amrikanli’s publication in the Middle East (where it became a bestseller), Ibrahim caused a scandal by publically refusing Egypt’s top literary prize, declaring illegitimate the power of a corrupt and oppressive Egyptian government to bestow the award. I tracked down the book in France after a friend mentioned hearing of an Arabic writer who’d written about San Francisco. I took up Amrikanli assuming it to be a travelogue; only several pages in did I realize it was in fact a novel. The story uses a fairly conventional conceit of the stranger in a strange land, following the almost picaresque adventures of visiting professor of Egyptian history Shukri as he navigates the cultural landscape of San Francisco. While the novel takes place in 1998 as the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal is unfolding, it nonetheless inhabits the shadow of the destroyed twin towers and speaks, indirectly, to post-9/11 U.S.-Arab relations. The large amount of contemporary Egyptian history woven into the narrative is a welcome education for those of us ignorant of what is arguably the most important nation in the Middle East. I found Amrikanli mordantly funny in places, and a complete surprise that changed forever my embarrassingly small conception of contemporary Middle Eastern writing. That it remains almost completely unknown in the United States eight years after its publication seems little short of disgraceful, and only serves to underscore Ibrahim’s implicit criticism of American insularity and self-absorption. And while the optimal moment for an English translation of this novel may perhaps be past, American readers, in particular, deserve the opportunity to engage Ibrahim’s caustic, funny, eye-opening and important work.

La Forêt des Renards Pendus, by Arto Paasilinna (Finland)

(The Forest of Hanged Foxes)

French translation from Finnish by Anne Colin du Terrail; untranslated into English

I don’t know of any writer quite like Finland’s Arto Paasilinna, at least I know of no other writer with a national stature like Paasilinna. His novels come with such regularity as to be regarded almost as an annual cause for celebration in Finland (I’m starting to join that ritual, and find myself reading one of his works about once a year). Like Jean Giono, Paasilinna expresses a deep connection with nature. He is also capable of tremendous wit - subtle, playful and often absurdist - and of crafting completely indelible images. Of the handful of Paasilinna works that I’ve read, La Forêt des Renards Pendus has been the most arresting and enjoyable, a sustained blend of black humor with an appreciation for the mysteries of the natural world that is rare in the literature of any country. Like many of his novels, this one takes place in  Finland’s frozen far north, where a thief on the run and a drunken military commander deserting his responsibilities wind up sharing a camp in a remote boreal forest with - as often turns up in Paasilinna’s work – an especially sentient representative from nature, in this case a clever fox.

Parfum de Glace, by Yoko Ogawa (Japan)

(My initial literal translation of this title as Ice Cream Flavor seems to miss completely the tone of the novel; I'd always privately thought of the title as Perfume of Ice; I think a better translation of the French might be Frozen Scent. In any event, I will be curious to see what title the novel will be given when it's finally translated into English, and would be grateful if anyone has any insight into the original Japanese title, Kōritsui ta kaori, 凍りついた香り).

French translation from Japanese by Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle; untranslated into English

At the recommendation of a French friend, I picked up a short Yoko Ogawa work – La Petite Pièce Hexagonale (The Small Hexagonal Chamber) - and quickly became hooked on Ogawa’s elegiac, crystalline, intimately haunting novels of separation and loneliness, filled with imaginative, lyric imagery. Her characters may be isolated individuals inhabiting melancholic landscapes, but they are also seekers whose intellectual and emotional curiosity draw them towards epiphanies and discoveries, often of exceptional beauty, at those intersections where solitude and connection collide. Fortunately, Ogawa’s fiction has begun to be published in English; however, Parfum de Glace has yet to appear.

Comme Tous Les Après-Midi, by Zoyâ Pirzâd (Iran)

(Just Like Every Afternoon)

French translation from Persian by Christophe Balaÿ; untranslated into English

I’m usually not much of a fan of short fiction, but I enjoyed this collection of stories. It’s of a genre that I think highly important: fiction that depicts the lives of women who might otherwise remain invisible. Many of Pirzâd’s short pieces are focused, affecting glimpses into the everyday domestic lives of women in Tehran, including a moving story in which a housewife dreams all day of writing down a story she’s thought of but, prevented from doing so by onerous household responsibilities, manages just a simple paragraph she triumphantly steals from the one moment of the day she finds to be her own. In another vignette, two men face one another on park benches while eating their lunches, both of them having made observation of others into a sort of pastime. It’s a nice conceit: two people, each playing the role of the writer, each assuming incorrectly that the world isn’t observing right back. A more unusual story concerning a reported invasion of locusts seems a thin political metaphor, but is successful nonetheless in delineating how propaganda can inspire a whole people to alarm, panic and drastic overreaction, a sort of mini “War of the Worlds.” Pirzâd’s novel Le Goût Âpre des Kakis (The Bitter Taste of Persimmons) won the 2009 Courrier International Award for international literature.

L’Art de la Joie, by Goliarda Sapienza (Italy)

(The Art of Joy)

French translation from Italian by Nathalie Castagné; untranslated into English

Despite a rather mundane title, Sapienza’s massive novel is a memorable, engaging work of 20^th century Italian literature that deserves wide readership and recognition. Published posthumously – Sapienza died in 1996 – this epic Sicilian novel begins in 1900 and follows its main character, Modesta, across nearly the entire span of the 20^th century in Sicily. While I was disappointed by the relative tedium of the final chapters of the novel, the lengthy opening chapter, a simply stunning rendering of Modesta’s difficult childhood in rural poverty, can almost stand alone as a novel in itself and was some of the finest writing I read in all of 2005, when the novel first appeared in French.  

Reflections on a Year of Reading: 2010

I’ve had a spectacular year of literary discovery. It seems only fitting that the setting of the last novel I read in 2010 is the same as that of the first novel I read in 2010:  Lisbon, a city that has haunted me since my first visit there just before the year started. Pascal Mercier’s Train de Nuit Pour Lisbonne opened the year; another French translation, of Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, his sole novel written in Portuguese, closed it. Requiem called out to me my last day in Paris via its cover: a detail of a cat I recognized as being from one of the marvelous azulejos adorning the walls of Lisbon’s Palais de La Fronteira. Many of the books I’ve read this year seem to have chosen me rather than the other way around, or have seemed to follow me about, Tabucchi’s work being a case in point. It’s not unusual, I know, for a book about a certain city to mention those same places one has visited oneself. But the experiences of the narrator in Requiem often paralleled aspects of my own visit to Lisbon with unusual particularity: an appreciation for the little garden outside the bar of the museum on Janelas Verdes near Eça de Quieros’ home; a shared fixation on a specific detail in Bosch’s “Temptation of Saint Anthony” of a naked couple flying upon a fish; an eerily similar experience in a modernist restaurant on one of the cais along the Tagus. For this reason I found Tabucchi’s novel infectively disquieting, as though his hallucination intersected my own at times. But I’m beginning to accept and anticipate that strange encounters between reality and fiction will continue to occur - in the city of Fernando Pessoa perhaps more strangely than elsewhere…

Highlights of this past reading year:

The hands-down winner must surely be Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvania trilogy: They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, and They Were Divided. Coming to the end of the final volume felt akin to coming up from a lengthy exploration under the surface of some ether-clear sea, a quiet immersion of sustained wonder at the world to be found there. But there were an exceptional number of other tremendous finds: Terry Andrews’ The Story of Harold (about which I hope to write at more length later to contribute what I can to keep this utterly unique, out-of-print American novel from vanishing forever from sight); Javier Marias’ absorbing magnum opus Your Face Tomorrow, finished at last; the quirky, strangely moving nonsense poems of Christian Morgenstern; the peripatetic Romanian writer Panaït Istrati, a collection of whose work almost literally jumped off a library shelf onto my head (and in any case succeeded gloriously in penetrating it, to my enduring gratitude and delight); Patrick Fermor’s sumptuously written adventures through the heart of Europe; Thomas Bernhard’s mesmerizing concatenation of ideas in Correction; an unexpected but much appreciated introduction to the profoundly talented, morbidly funny Beryl Bainbridge in The Bottle Factory Outing; Stephen Benatar’s fabulously deranging camp horror story Wish Her Safe at Home; Eça de Quieros’ rich, deep and deeply satisfying masterpiece, The Maias (Lisbon again); a reluctant finish to the last of Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan detective novels (about which I hope to post something soon); another visit with the dazzling César Aira in his wildly inventive delicacy, La Princesse Printemps; a moving, dream-like complicity with Antonio Tabucchi’s hallucinatory Lisbon Requiem; and my first taste of many other terrific authors previously unfamiliar to me, among them Francis Wyndham, Anna Gavalda, Tom McCarthy, Zoyâ Pirzâd, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Deszö Kosztolányi. 

A bonne année to all, with a coupe of champagne raised to 2011 being at least as rewarding a year as 2010 for discovering great literature.

César Aira: The Fabulist Manifesto

Argentinian author César Aira publishes two to three novellas a year, most of them about 100 pages long. To my knowledge only five have so far been translated into English, so I was greatly pleased to discover, in a bookstore in Toulouse, another of his novels in a French translation and further to find on the inside flap of the book the titles of 14 others translated into French, only one of which seems to overlap with existing English translations. Aira writes some of the most exciting contemporary fiction I’ve read. Despite their brevity, each of his remarkably compact novellas seems expansive and expanding, a small, swirling galaxy. They remind me of those early two-minute long Herb Alpert tunes – brief, perhaps, but able to convey a whole universe and seem absolutely epic. I love tight, wildly surprising writing like this – although I’m not sure there even exists a “like this” when referencing Aira, given his astonishing originality. His little novels - fantastically fertile, displaying a tremendously energetic and talented imagination - seem as though they just dropped onto earth out of the sky, with almost nothing at all familiar about them. And despite the compactness of these works, the economical quality of the writing isn’t the obvious feature it is with some other writers who seem to pride themselves on economy of language (I’m thinking, for example, of Annie Ernaux’s La Place, with its athletic writing as terse as a slogan on a t-shirt – and that’s a book I happen to like very much). Aira’s writing may be tight, but it’s also surprisingly lush. These novels are marvelous confections – strangely serious confections sometimes, as in An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, but confections nonetheless (it seems somehow appropriate that two of the Aira novels I’ve read feature ice cream as an important plot element). Simply knowing that there are many more of his works ahead of me makes me feel as though I’ve been handed a box of those astonishing savory-sweet delicacies from Damascus, those improbable rhapsodies of rose petals, pistachios, cardamom, apricot, nougat and the like. They’re so transporting that you don’t want to eat them all at once, but you feel enormously fortunate to have them around for when the urge strikes you.

The Aira novel I picked up in Toulouse, La Princesse Printemps, is certainly the wildest, most fantastical and amusing of the Aira books I’ve read, laugh-out-loud funny in places, but the effect that dominates it above all is its incomparable, nearly delirious originality. One of the themes of the novel is in fact that serious fiction must strive to create something new, and La Princesse Printemps appears to do this on every page. For this reason, I’m reluctant to give away anything about the novel, since its surprises are so myriad and captivating, a succession of strikingly original conceits that, despite their strangeness, have nothing to do with the sort of adolescent gravitation towards the weird and exotic that marks, for example, so many contemporary American writers. I think I won’t give much away, though, if I reveal that La Princesse Printemps is intentionally a fable, with a princess who, in her island idyll, spends her time translating mediocre mass-market fiction into Spanish until the day a dark cloud and a black ship appear on the horizon. La Princesse Printemps, like Aira’s other novels, also manages to touch on more weighty questions of history, philosophy, literature and translation – his work consistently engages the very nature of literature - but its fabulist quality would make it a terrific book to read aloud some night with friends. I suspect even children - even though they might not understand a lot of it - would greatly enjoy hearing this novel read out loud.

Aira is one of those rare writers who make me feel as though anything I might say about him would be entirely superfluous and probably best replaced with the gesture of simply pressing one of his books into another reader’s hands with firm, silent insistence. So rather than say anything more about the novel itself, I’ll frame it between two favorite poems it called to mind. This is not the first time one of Aira’s novels has prompted thoughts of poetry more than prose (though I’d never think of describing one of them as a prose poem). If I were to append an epigram to La Princesse Printemps, Charles Baudelaire’s “A Landscape” would be a natural choice, here rendered into English by F. P. Sturm:

            I would, when I compose my solemn verse,

            Sleep near the heaven as do astrologers,

            Near the high bells, and with a dreaming mind

            Hear their calm hymns blow upon the wind.

            Out of my tower, with chin upon my hands,

            I’ll watch the singing, babbling human bands;

            And see the clock-towers like spars against the sky,

            And heavens that bring thoughts of eternity;

            And softly, through the mist, will watch the birth

            Of stars in heaven and lamplight on the earth;

            The threads of smoke that rise above the town;

            The moon that pours her pale enchantment down.

            Seasons will pass as Autumn fades the rose;

            And when comes Winter with his weary snows,

            I’ll shut the doors and window-casements tight,

            And build my faery palace in the night.

            Then I will dream of blue horizons deep,

            Of gardens where the marble fountains weep,

            Of kisses, and of ever-singing birds –

            A sinless Idyll built of innocent words.

            And Trouble, knocking at my window-pane

            And at my closet door, shall knock in vain;

            I will not heed him with his stealthy tread,

            Nor from my reverie uplift my head;

            For I will plunge deep in the pleasure still

            Of summoning the springtime with my will,

            Drawing the sun out of my heart, and there

            With burning thoughts making a summer air.

And the coda I’d choose for this strange, memorable little book would most certainly have to be this excerpt from Walter Arndt’s translation of Christian Morgenstern’s “The Moonsheep”:

            The moonsheep, lo, at dawn is dead.

            Itself is white, the sun is red.

            The moonsheep.

A Journey Round Karinthy's Skull

Someone, perhaps an American poet of the Beat Generation, suggested years ago that writers and artists should be included in the teams of astronauts sent to explore space. If ever there were a book that underscores the value of this idea - of incorporating the artistic temperament in humanity’s great explorations into the unknown - it is Frigyes Karinthy’s A Journey Round My Skull (translated by Vernon Duckworth Barker, New York Review Books 2008) – a writer’s-eye view of the development of a brain tumor and the subsequent surgery to remove it. Melding philosophy, humor, fantasy, dreams, reflections and sharp insight, Karinthy invites us along on the journey through his grave illness and operation. While the description of Karinthy’s surgery (while fully conscious and with only a local anesthetic) is not for those with sensitive stomachs, one could hardly ask for a more genial and courageous guide to lead us through his hell.

Having just completed the selection of Karinthy’s short pieces, Grave and Gay, I was prepared for his signature sense of the absurd and his wry humor, but not for the enormous leap in sensitivity, maturity and quality between those earlier works and A Journey Round My Skull. The latter is rightfully regarded as a classic, and not only of medical literature. Karinthy provides a remarkably multi-faceted approach to describing not only pathology, but the attendant details of diagnosis and treatment – of arrogant doctors, too-cheerful well-wishers, and all the multifarious indignities of infirmity. Yet he also offers tremendous generosity of spirit, a boldly imaginative ability to view his malady from multiple points of view, and a pervasive attitude of forgiveness and gratitude.  For Karinthy, his tumor and illness become experiences of life to be treated with detachment, inquisitiveness, and philosophical inquiry – but never with self-pity.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the brief introduction by Oliver Sacks, whose writing is so often such a joy to read. A couple of careless errors in chronology suggest it was somewhat tossed off. There’s also a regretful omission of one of the more notable bits of trivia concerning Karinthy’s illness as related in the wonderful short biography appended to Grave and Gay, that many years prior to his illness Karinthy had written of the death of his first wife: “I feel that when she died some sort of a growth began in my brain or as if a sharp object was jabbed into it. I cannot pull this knife out ever again – for she remains dead.”

Sacks concludes his introduction by noting as a weakness “a certain amount of fanciful contrivance and extravagance – though this is something that Karinthy becomes more and more conscious of as he writes the book, as he is sobered by his experience, and as he tried to weld his novelistic imagination to the factual, even the clinical, realities of his situation.” I’ll simply point out and forgive Sacks’ slip in implying that Karinthy’s narrative was written in a sort of real time that would allow him to become more conscious of his “extravagance” and more “sobered” by his experience – this is clearly a book amply revised and reworked, in all its fanciful detail, after the fact of the operation. However, I think Sacks makes a rather unfortunate reading of Karinthy – one certainly understandable from a clinician’s perspective, where a more direct and clear patient narrative can be of great help in diagnosis and treatment  – but one that perhaps reads Karinthy exactly in reverse. As is evident in Grave and Gay, part of Karinthy’s  style and strength as a writer is his refusal to deny any experience of consciousness, whether an impulsive response to some quotidian incident, a dream, fantasy, or even those psychological events that slip into delusion and derangement and border on madness (and in contrast to others who’ve taken a view of madness as exploration of consciousness, such as the psychologist R.D. Laing, who express a more romantic and objectifying view of the mentally ill as pilgrims into the hidden regions of consciousness, Karinthy’s view here is a far more defensible subjective one). The “fanciful contrivance and extravagance” of A Journey Round My Skull – and Karinthy’s ability to tell the truth, but at a slant - are precisely what set it apart from any number of far more pedestrian medical memoirs. Karinthy’s willingness to follow the growth of his tumor with a sense of detached curiosity and circumspect humor, and to admit into his narrative the tatters of dreams and feverish hallucinations - elevates A Journey Round My Skull from an ordinary tale of surviving illness into the realm of literature. 

One aspect of A Journey Round My Skull I found personally interesting, given my recent reading, was Karinthy’s slightly abstract effort to link his illness to the dissolution of Hungary itself. Towards the end of the book, he ascribes the development of his tumor in part to the demise of Hungary’s glorious period prior to World War I – that same period so magnificently encapsulated in the snowglobe world of Milkós Bánffy’s Transylvania triology. In conversation with his young niece, Karinthy finds in the destructive forces within his own body an analogue in “the real shipwreck…you must have heard, Nini, of that old Hungary before the war. You’ve probably pictured it yourself as best you could. It was like one of those proud ships over there, with all her canvas swelling to the wind…You have heard how the storm broke, and the ship pitched and strained.  You were told how she crashed onto the rocks and lay there, breaking up, with her mast leaning over towards the horizon. That ship was ours, Nini, and she was carrying a fine cargo! I don’t know on what Cape of Good Hope lay the harbor for which she was making, but I do know that we were planning to barter our rich cargo for the diamonds of some enchanted land…Well, Nini, that’s all over and done with.  The beautiful cargo is no more – the coloured crystals, the flashing jewels, the perfumed attar of roses. Finished the thousand pretty trifles and the gay knick-knacks…This cannot seem other than an arid island to me.”

Rather than spoil the ending, I’ll simply confirm that Karinthy’s character is hardly one to let such a speech end on such a despairing note. As Dante toured hell with a poet as a guide, so we are led through the awfulness and fearsomeness of illness accompanied by a courageous, uniquely creative, and life-affirming visionary. And if the most obvious value of having an artist along in such a dark and chilling exploration is to provide the humanistic aspect of inquiry often lacking in more scientific, quantitative approaches, Karinthy also reminds us that those artists’ tools of imagination, relentless curiosity and courage to penetrate to the truth serve also as vital tools of resilience and resistance.

Frigyes Karinthy, Grave and Gay

“When was I right, when I said yes, or when I said no? I only know it as an irresolute man knows counting his buttons: ‘Yes, no, yes, no,’ who says yes or no – with decision when he comes to the last button, but who knows in his heart that he only said it because it was the last, and not because he believes that it told the truth.” 

              - Frigyes Karinthy, "Days," from Grave and Gay.

Here is an intriguing curiosity I picked up in that particularly lovely and lucky manner of making new literary discoveries: finding it on a shelf in the library near to something else I’d been seeking. Frigyes Karinthy was already on my radar screen; his best known work, A Journey ‘Round My Skull, a patient's eye view of Karinthy’s own brain tumor and the operation to remove it, has been on my list of books to read for some time. But I knew little about him or about any other works he might have written. A Journey ‘Round My Skull is technically not even fiction, so I welcomed the surprise of finding Grave and Gay, a collection of translated short fiction pieces - a surprise then magnified by subsequently learning that Karinthy wrote some 40 novels and 2,000 poems. (What is it about these prolific Hungarian authors? The introduction to my copy of Gyula Krúdy’s The Adventures of Sindbad states that Krúdy wrote some 50 novels and over 3,000 short stories - so take that!).

Grave and Gay consists of a few dozen short selections arranged thematically and translated by a handful of different translators (published in 1973 by the Hungarian publishing house Corvina). Based on this brief collection, and if forced to play the game of making comparisons to other writers, I might describe Karinthy as an amalgam between Kafka, Borges, and Thurber. The terrific short biography provided in the afterword to this volume also links him to Stephen Leacock, a comparison I found particularly apt in that the stories share Leacock’s sense of absurdist, situational humor. Karinthy, however, is far more blackly comic and psychological. These stories are mostly simple conceits – a man who mistakes a lunatic for a psychiatrist; a condemned prisoner grateful to the guard for waking him up from an awful nightmare on the morning of his execution; a hell in which the greedy are punished by being forced to use up all the commodities they’d hoarded during the war. At the same time, Karinthy’s writing crackles along the edge of sanity, drifts into irrealities and dreams, and sends off charming sparks of imagination: in one story, a character explains the red of firemen’s uniforms as a biological adaptation to allow them to blend in with the color of the flames. Women, alas, do not fare so well in Karinthy’s world; there’s a misogynistic element to some of the stories I found deflating, including one in which the narrator attempts to rub the layers of make-up off the face of his lover and keeps rubbing until her head is gone, at which point he realizes he can now take advantage of her body (only to find that the layers of clothing she wears are like onion peelings with, at the center, nothing). Karinthy is at his best in the pieces that don’t try to navigate the differences between men and women. The brief story “Skirmish” is as compact and powerful an anti-war piece as anything by the War Poets, but with a degree of outrage at the fundamental cowardice behind war – soldiers sent to die for others unwilling to fight for themselves – that makes Wilfred Owen’s sarcasm at an epigram like “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” seem almost benign. The centerpiece of Grave and Gay is the book’s most lengthy story, “Two Ships,” a fantastical, Borges-like inquiry into the necessity of imagination, in which Christopher Columbus and the alchemist Sinesius debate the flatness of the earth as they sail together on Columbus’ first voyage out across the Atlantic into the unknown. This story alone – a departure from the sketch-like quality of many of the other selections - merits the price of admission. Karinthy is a writer well worth exploring. 

Miklós Bánffy and The Writing on the Wall

Transylvania - that Hungarian/Romanian region of high mountains, mist-shrouded forests and ruined castles all too frequently associated with Count Dracula - may one day, if the world proves just, be even better known for another, less fictionally embellished Count: Miklós Bánffy, the author of Erdélyi Történet - The Transylvania Trilogy, also known as The Writing on the Wall.

These three volumes -  They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, and They Were Divided – offer one of those increasingly rare experiences in a reader’s life: the opportunity to encounter a true masterpiece of 20^th century literature still largely unfamiliar to much of the literary world. With a sense of respectful awe and that curiously pleasurable melancholy with which one comes to the end of a greatly affecting, singular work, I’ve just finished the trilogy, which for me also offered the even more rare and private experience of finding a work so resonant as to enter a select personal literary pantheon: those books through which I feel (egotistically, yet irrepressibly) that the author seems to be speaking to me personally, and towards which I involuntarily adopt a strangely fierce, almost proprietary defensiveness. I found The Writing on the Wall to be an enthralling, compelling work, providing the same liberating sense of being opened by a work of literature as I experienced in finishing, for example, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, or more germanely, two other works in the pantheon,  Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, that movingly depict, with intimate and sure authority, the decline of nobility in a changing world. I realize that this kind of wantonly promiscuous praise is liable to invite accusations of indiscriminately making an all too hasty rush towards the wildest and most irresponsible of claims. But in the case of Bánffy I’m willing to take that risk. This is literature on a grand scale - as engaging, stimulating and enjoyable as anything I’ve read, yet unusual enough for me to feel curiously protective of it.

The Writing on the Wall provides pleasures and illuminations in abundance: sensitive and deep psychological insight; engagement with grand existential and moral questions; glimpses into unfamiliar cultures and landscapes; rapturous depictions of the natural world; history on both a grand scale and in the smaller structures of everyday life; an energetic, daring and contemplative curiosity that ranges into the smallest corners of experience; and assured and confident story-telling, sharply intelligent, limpid and lucid, slyly humorous, romantic without being sentimental, generously humanistic without being pedantic, omniscient yet invitingly intimate. The action spans the ten years leading up to the beginning of World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, principally oscillating between the Transylvanian city of Koloszvar (today’s Romanian city of Cluj Napoca) and Budapest, with side excursions to other cities and towns of Hungary and to Vienna, Venice, the Swiss Alps, and into the wild mountain ranges of Transylvania. With exceptional clarity and a seamless narrative structure, Bánffy depicts in great detail the intertwining lives of Transylvania’s leading families amid their manor houses and estates, their clubs and apartments in the capital, and their forest holdings in the mountains. His view of the culture of Transylvania’s nobility at the beginning of the 20^th century is both a panoramic and penetrating portrait of this unusual region, set apart like an island from the rest of Hungary, crisscrossed by mountain wildernesses, stark plains and primitive forests, populated by the Magyar descendents of Tartars and Mongols, by Romanians and gypsies and Jews, situated at the crossroads of European history between the Ottoman empire and the Balkans to the east and south, Russia to the north and Germany to the west; between the aspiration for autonomy versus an uneasy dependence upon the Dual Monarchy ruled by Vienna; and between centuries of tradition and the exigencies of a changing, modern world.

The story - as encompassing, as a work concerned with the fate of a nation, as any I can think of - primarily focuses on the young legislator Count Balint Abady (modeled after Bánffy himself, apparently), his growing political sensibility and concern over Transylvania’s fate, his reformist efforts to establish forestry cooperatives to aid oppressed minorities in the mountains, and the chaotic arc of the grande passion he feels for the Countess Adrienne Miloth. Alternate chapters trace the struggles of Laszlo Gyeroffy, Abady’s talented but dissolute, tragic cousin.  On a larger scale, the characters in The Writing on the Wall – its title and those of the individual volumes taken from the admonitory tale of the feast of Belshazzar in the Book of Daniel – are pulled along, often in a state of denial, by the tumultuous political events hurtling Hungary towards the First World War. Bánffy is particularly good at not allowing the reader to lose track of his extensive cast of characters; many of the key ones are cleverly presented in the opening pages of the They Were Counted, in which Abady, returning to Transylvania after a long absence, introduces us to them as they pass by him in their carriages along the road towards a grand party at a countryside estate.

The world depicted by Bánffy often seems stranded in the 19^th century, or at times even earlier, as though feudalism had only just ended.  Intensely evocative, atmospheric scenes of finely-dressed nobility idling away at hunting parties, glamorous balls and dinners, escapades in the countryside and nights at the casinos present an idyll of leisure punctuated by dramatic family conflicts, duels and passionate love affairs, political intrigues and nefarious business dealings (awash throughout, it seems, in alcohol and alcoholism). But The Writing on the Wall is unmistakably 20^th century: a description of characters adrift in a gondola on the dark surface of the lagoon at Venice, isolated in infinite, blackest night like a vanishing point in a vast nothingness, could almost fit in an existentialist novel. And to pass off The Writing on the Wall as some sort of outstanding period piece, a softly-brushed canvas like something painted by Watteau, would fail to recognize the probing intelligence behind the portrait and neglect the devastating criticisms Bánffy levels at the dissipation and frivolity that helped lead his country towards ruin. As indelible a picture as it is of a fading culture, it’s also a substantive political novel that takes on the key figures of the Austro-Hungarian empire’s decline as well as those ordinary persons who failed to live up to their responsibilities to the country and to one another. While maintaining a compassionate and forgiving understanding of human frailty, Bánffy remonstrates against the idleness; the easy escape into trivial pursuits; the insularity, nationalism, and sloganism; the toxic partisan righteousness; and the indulgence, among leaders and ordinary persons alike, in senseless, age-old hatreds – all those failures to heed the writing on the wall that warned Hungary of its impending splintering and Transylvania of its abandonment. That said, Bánffy hardly comes across as a firebrand; his narrative voice and his central character possess a sagaciousness and equanimity that seem nearly Daoist, especially in the sublime descriptions of Balint Abady’s journeys through the bewitching landscapes of Transylvania and his “sense of wonder and enchantment” at its limitless plains and high mountains, dense forests and lush meadows, where nature serves as a balance and restorative to the harsh vicissitudes of the human world.

As well as any writer I’ve encountered, Bánffy richly delves into history great and small. One gets a broad education in the late history of the Austro-Hungarian empire as well as a wealth of revealing historical details (such as the tossed-off observation in the third volume that the Adaby family’s Denestornya castle, well into the first decade of the 20^th century, still has neither electricity nor indoor plumbing). At the same time, Bánffy remains acutely conscious of the universal aspects of those forces and conflicts that help to shape history, lending The Writing on the Wall a freshness and contemporary relevance. The insularity, chauvinism, vying for short-term personal gain, blind party loyalty and legislative obstructionism displayed in The Writing on the Wall pose the same threats today as they did in the period Bánffy describes, just as the courage to challenge these forces meets with the same resistance.  The novels also offer memorable glimpses into the complex mechanisms of legislative politics and the nuances of political machinations and manipulations. Like his character Balint Abady, Milkós Bánffy served as a legislator in the Hungarian parliament (and even makes a Hitchcock-like cameo appearance among a group of political reformers gathered around Abady in a scene in the third volume).

Though the novels’ focus rests squarely on the culture of Transylvanian nobility (presumably it was for this reason that the novel disappeared under long decades of communist rule), Bánffy levels his gaze across class strata, challenging the fortunate to question their responsibilities to the nation at large, its poor, its minority populations, and all those oppressed or abandoned. Some of the most forceful scenes in The Writing on the Wall involve the poorest and most vulnerable members of society: mountain peasants forced into crushing debt and servitude by usurious lawyers and notaries; a young servant, pregnant by her exploitative employer, forced into the streets; a young Jewish girl decimated when a fierce adolescent crush is obliterated by the death of its object; and throughout the novel, one character after another subjected to all manner of impediments to fulfilling their hopes and aspirations. Bánffy treats each with nuanced psychological insight and compassion, extending even to one of the novel’s most despicable characters, whose descent into madness is treated in detail and with a respect for a humanistic view of pathology such as one finds in one of Freud’s remarkable case studies.

While Balint Abady conservatively defends the traditions and institutions that have evolved over Hungary’s long history, he is also a reformer determined to effect change and to remind the leaders of the nation to uphold the most generous possible interpretation of noblesse oblige, such as affirmed in a letter from Abady’s father that Abady’s mother pulls from her desk and reads aloud to Balint and his cousin Laszlo:

I know that I am placing a great burden on you when I command you to deal with everything personally. You must realize that our agents, and our tenants, see only what is to their own advantage of what is to yours. I expect more than this from you. The patriarchal relationship that has existed for centuries between the landowner and the people of this village did not end when the serfs were liberated. You must still take the lead, help people, take care of them, especially all those who are not as privileged as you in matters of fortune and education. Think of them as your children, the village people and the people who serve you in the house. You must be severe, but above all you must be just and understanding. This is your duty in life. 

           

In large part, the narrative follows Balint and Laszlo’s respective responses to this charge, as well as questions what the charge can mean in the modern world.

One reason I found The Writing on the Wall so absorbing is certainly due to the unfamiliarity of the world it depicts. While at times it seems as recognizable as something out of any number of great 19^th century novels, more often than not it struck me as so alien as to be as invented and as vastly conceived as August Tappan Wright’s Islandia. Reading the trilogy, I thought repeatedly of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s observation concerning Transylvania in Between the Woods and the Water (the book that indirectly led me to discover Miklós Bánffy in the first place) that the region’s geography seemed to approximate most closely such fictional creations as Ruritania in Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda or the fantastical lands one finds in Hergé’s Tintin books. Bánffy’s Transylvania possesses this exotic quality, I think, not only because The Writing on the Wall provides such a broad and deep depiction of a region scarcely known to much of the world beyond its superficial contemporary reputation for ruined castles harboring black-caped vampires, but also because the world he describes has been all but erased, in more than one sense, from the face of the Earth. The culture that Bánffy so painstakingly recreates disappeared into the fire and blood of not one but two world wars. A glance at the completion date noted on the last page of They Were Divided – May, 1940 – is enough to suggest that Bánffy wrote with not only the events leading towards World War I in mind but almost certainly with alarm at the growing warning signs around Europe during the 1930’s. In fact, the Bánffy family castle at Bonţida – the model for Balint Abady’s own Denestornya – would soon enough be almost completely destroyed by the Nazis as retribution for Miklós Bánffy’s efforts to persuade Romania to side with the Allies (readers impressed by the striking descriptions of Denestornya may be pleased to know that the Bánffy castle is currently undergoing restoration). Beyond this, many of the very names of the places Bánffy mentions are gone, elided by shifting borders and languages and by expedient decisions in distant capitals. I envy the reader who can find an excellent map of Transylvania from the early part of the 20^th century so that he or she can follow the novel’s action from place to place. Those without a background in Romanian and Hungarian and who hope to do this by turning to a contemporary map will most likely find the task as difficult as I did.

I found very little in The Writing on the Wall that grated or struck me as a weakness. While one can argue that the work employs some familiar literary conventions, it is so singular, such a compelling and unusual work, that one can overlook them. Or rather, rarely in my reading have I come across a writer so fully aware of the conventions he employs and so confident in his use of them to tell the story he wishes to tell. Occasionally I found myself wincing at some canard of male chauvinism (for example, at one point the narrator suggests off-handedly that women are destined to have a nursing instinct), but these occur rarely, vastly overshadowed by Bánffy’s deliberate and careful attention to the intimate and public lives of his female characters. Not since Henry James have I encountered a male author of the period who makes such a committed and concentrated effort to explore the inner lives of his female characters. While the love scenes between Balint and Adrienne at times drift towards the romance novel end of the descriptive spectrum, Bánffy somehow always manages to pull them back from the brink. He’s also refreshingly open and free of any trace of Puritanism in his treatment of sexuality, including in a scene in which Balint Abady offers – to God, no less - a convincing defense of adultery.

About halfway through reading the first volume of The Writing on the Wall, I realized, with some surprise, that I was enjoying it as much as I’ve enjoyed anything I’ve ever read. I’m happy to say that this sense continued through to the final page of the final volume.  I have no hesitation in recommending The Writing on the Wall with the greatest of enthusiasm. While I’m fiercely delighted to welcome its three volumes into my personal pantheon of favored books, I’m also confident that, beyond whatever personal tastes may bias me, it’s a work that richly deserves and will one day receive wide recognition as among the quiet, powerful glories of 20^th century literature.

The first (and only) English translation of Bánffy’s trilogy began appearing in 1999; when the third volume came out in 2002, it was awarded the prestigious Oxford-Weidenfeld prize for the translation by the late Patrick Thursfield and by Miklós Bánffy’s granddaughter, Katalin Bánffy-Jelen. The story of the translation itself, presented by Thursfield at the beginning of They Were Counted, makes for fascinating reading. Patrick Leigh Fermor, appropriately enough, has also provided a short preface. To my initial dismay I learned that the books, with the exception of the 2^nd volume, are difficult to find and often extraordinarily expensive, and so made use of the good fortune of my access to a first class library and checked them out there. However, I rejoiced at the serendipity of discovering, soon thereafter, that the three volumes are being reissued this very month by Arcadia Books and are already becoming available in the UK.