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.

¡Hooray for Hollywood!

The Twayne author series volume on Ramón Gómez de la Serna briefly describes his 1923 “Hollywood” novel Cinelandia as a somewhat disjointed effort that attempts to imitate cinematic techniques but “seems merely to play with its subject” and “fails to come off, for Ramón was writing about something he knew nothing about.” Having now read this deliriously delightful novel (in its French translation, Ciné-Ville), I believe this is a bit like faulting Jules Verne for having never visited the moon. Ciné-Ville may be many things, but its accuracy as a portrayal of Hollywood is rather beside the point. Ramón’s invented fantasy metropolis of Ciné-Ville, entirely consecrated to cinema, is about as much a faithful rendering of Hollywood as a typical Hollywood film is a faithful rendering of whatever inspired it.

Yet Ciné-Ville nonetheless manages to offer up a recognizable, indelible, and even - given that it was written before the genre of the “Hollywood novel” even existed – essential portrait of the whole rangelanda[i] of nascent Hollywood: its artifice, luminous leading ladies, suave leading men, grimacing villains (relegated to their own special class in the city of Ciné-Ville), tyrannical directors, droll fat men, fawning fanaticism over every latest ingénue, torrid off-screen dramas, serial marriages and divorces (mandatory in Ciné-Ville the morning following a marriage), wild cocktail parties, producers and stunt men, stardom-seeking pilgrims and the casting couches on which they land, takes and retakes, glycerin tears, cute fox terriers, and bleached-white smiles that reproduce along “kilometers of film.”

That Ciné-Ville is not intended as a literal portrait of Hollywood is evident from the first page, in which the city is described, as in a newsreel, as a special zone of film production with an outer appearance borrowed from all corners of the globe:

Ciné-Ville has the silhouette of Constantinople, all the while calling to mind Florence and New York. It contains within its limits not the vast totality of those cities, but a neighborhood borrowed from each. Ciné-Ville, Noah’s Ark of different architectures. Possessed of such immodesty that an exotic exhibitionism is unleashed even in its constructions, the Florentine Dome facing a Great Pagoda...Strange panorama of an immense Luna-Park…Approaching the city, one finds reproductions of buildings from around the world, a great museum collection…Arab architecture mingles with Scandinavian… All is strange, conveying an impression like those decorative vignettes that used to illustrate the headings in old magazines, cathedrals mixed among mosques among ancient villas...

The most prominent of Ciné-Ville’s outlandish edifices is its immense electrical generating plant, the world’s most powerful. Cleverly disguised as a cathedral, it also conveniently functions as a film backdrop. This factory produces the prodigious, blinding light that powers Ciné-Ville’s “fabulous center of superproduction”:   

From all sides hang great crystal chandeliers, fantasmic spidery arrays, immense batteries, casements of bulbs, whole plateaus of light, electric globes like those illuminating the dressed windows of the great department stores. A whole range of lights, sconces, magnificent new figurations pour blasts of light into the studios, vast luminous platters of cream. Mercury vapor lamps give one intramedullary injections. Any nuance of feeling seeks refuge in darkened screening rooms and somber hearts: the excess of light obliterates emotion. What miserable beings these are who thrive on the cold simulation of life, in full denial!

Though the novel consists primarily of discreet chapters each devoted to a facet of the world of movies but that accumulate to portray the whole, there are scraps of story in Ciné-Ville and a few recurring, albeit hastily-sketched characters who serve as little more than types to populate the landscape. The few threads that create anything resembling a plot first involve a newcomer to Ciné-Ville, Jacques Estruck, and his integration into this blithe city bathed in an “air of a Palm Sunday, even on Monday nights.” He is first tasked, as is everyone in Ciné-Ville, with choosing a screen name to replace his real one (Ramón’s choices for many of these names struck me as pitch-perfect: Venus d’Argent, Max York, Elsa Brothers, Cléo de Mérode, Edma Blake, Mac Porland, Julanne Barry, King Walter, Charles Wilh). Estruck’s story, like the few other mini-plots in Ciné-Ville, is entirely secondary to Ramón’s interest in capturing the whole emerging world of cinema, and Estruck disappears altogether when Ciné-Ville’s inhabitants, accompanied the novel’s omniscient narrator, abruptly swivel their focus in the direction of the cinema’s newest ingénue, Charlotte Bray, who sucks up all the attention in Ciné-Ville like a resplendent black hole. I’m hardly giving anything away by relating that Charlotte’s future in cinema is cut short by an unfortunate encounter obviously modeled on the Fatty Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe scandal that obsessed Hollywood in the early 1920’s.

Ciné-Ville is pure Ramónismo – that term given for Gómez de la Serna’s singularly poetic, bravura style that weaves into the narrative multiple iterations of his famous “greguerías” – those condensed, humorous, impressionistic and metaphorical one-liners that here paint the contours of the city and its inhabitants. While Ciné-Ville possesses some narrative cohesion, Ramónismo is in full flower throughout, occasionally with self-reflexive humor. In a chapter entitled “The Perverse Child,” Ramón describes a spoiled child-actor who issues quotable, pithy pronouncements that seem parodies of Ramón’s own greguerías. Elsewhere in the novel, he appears to construct scenes expressly so he can fit in his greguerían conceits, such as an exchange between two window-shopping actresses, one of whom sees gloves as “an absolution” that allows one to “exchange one’s sins” and feel “like a virgin” each time one puts on a new pair, and her companion who wishes gemstones were soluble, so that she “could chew them, or throw them into champagne to let them melt like ice.”

At times these surrealistic elements blow up into whole, barmy, kooky anecdotes, as when as when a leading lady, in a jealous rage over her husband’s pursuit of a young actress, takes her revenge by starting a popular kissing school (the descriptions of various aspects of kissing and of what constitutes a good kiss are worth publication by themselves) or another sensation which grips the city when an actress' beauty mark is stolen by her brutish husband. On the day of the verdict for this theft, Ciné-Ville’s great fake moon glows above the city and carries, in empathetic approval, its own beauty mark. Many of Ciné-Ville’s pleasures derive from similarly poetic absurdities, yet, as in his stories, Ramón can transform a moment of absurdist levity into something wonderfully poignant or penetrating. Just when one suspects him of a certain facility and triviality, he manages a lyrical and profound moment that reveals an artist looking deeply and appreciatively at the world even as he’s reveling deliriously in it.

Far from “merely playing” with his subject, Ramón seems to be cavorting wildly, turning the full force of his observational powers towards the world of cinema. Ciné-Ville raises probing and prescient questions about film as art form and as popular medium, including its relation to the novel, confounding of illusion and reality, obsession with celebrity and denial of death (one of the more poetic motifs in the novel is its repeated suggestion of illusory intimations of immortality attained by the preservation of faces, gestures, and the presences of actors and actresses on celluloid). These observations range from charming perceptions about the capabilities of the new medium - such as noting that in cinema, the dead don’t get up after the applause - to predictions about its future.  Ciné-Ville may well contain one of the first literary references to television, as well as a prediction that film will one day be disseminated by “radio wave” and a particularly far-sighted speculation that it will one day be replaced by virtual reality, in a remarkable passage that goes a step further by anticipating virtual reality’s authoritarian aspects.

Despite this clairvoyance, one is never quite sure, in this impressionistic compendium and in the face of what obviously represents some skepticism regarding the art form that would dominate the century, exactly how Ramón feels about cinema. Though he’s undoubtedly awed by it, he seems almost afraid of its potential, piqued by its turn towards melodrama both on-screen and off, and mocking of the frivolity that accompanies it. A hint of this seems to be provided in a chapter entitled “Experimental Films,” in which Ramón describes a parallel, isolated and nearly forlorn “intimate studio” where the new medium of cinema is liberally tested and pushed to its very limits, just as he appears to be doing with literature, but in the end Ramón seems to toy equally with this more “serious” cinema, as is evident from the delightful titles of some of these imaginary experimental films: The Lost Hour, The Eyes of the Planets, Battle of the Glow-worms, Cabaret of the Dead.

I’d noted in my earlier post about Gómez de la Serna that he seems to view the world through a sort of telescoping, microscoping kaleidoscope. Ciné-Ville too left me with this impression of some mad, mechanical, scientific eye at work, its gaze going everywhere and seeming to treat everything it falls upon equally, whether material or human, which may explain the sketch-like quality of the characters. Yet at the same time, this “Ramónoscope” appears capable of strong emotion, as in an uproariously sarcastic treatment of self-appointed Hollywood censors or in a charged chapter entitled “The Blacks,” which evinces the worst stereotypes of Black actors in early Hollywood while simultaneously ferociously exposing Hollywood’s racism.

Screwy and bally-hooey, Ciné-Ville provides an invaluable portrait of cinema’s early years and a snapshot, as though frozen across time, of Hollywood’s excesses then and now. What most stuck me about Ciné-Ville was its modernity; apart from a handful of minor period details, Ciné-Ville could easily be mistaken for a contemporary novel. Ramón may never have visited the place – his knowledge of Hollywood may have been gleaned exclusively from the screen itself, and at a distance of some 10,000 kilometers – but his understanding of Hollywood dynamics still at work today and the great poetic humor he brings to his observations merit Ciné-Ville a revered place among the great novels of Hollywood. Exuberant, sparkling and with a depth of presence surpassing its playful exterior, this kid stays in the picture.

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[i] A useful word invented by a friend during a tipsy, late-night conversation years ago to describe the ensemble of certain independent signifiers that, together, suggest an understandable whole, as, for example, one might say of a wagon wheel, a bleached cow skull, and a length of barbed wire that they constitute some of the rangelanda of the Old West.

A Post about a Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room

For those planning to enter Geoffrey Dyer’s book, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, I’m here with advice. Before setting off to explore, pay attention to the posted signs, unless, like the hapless, eager reader I was, you simply bumble in - at your own peril.

I’d been curious to read Dyer, so when I learned that his new work concerned a film that had made a great impression on me, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the time seemed ripe to get acquainted. For those unfamiliar with Tarkovsky’s 1974 film or the 1971 novel on which it is based, Arkady and Boris Strugasky’s Roadside Picnic[i], the premise is this: some mysterious event has occurred that has resulted in the cordoning off of a “Zone” where bizarre, unpredictable and dangerous phenomena occur and that seems to possess a capacity [the “Room” in Dyer’s title] for answering one’s innermost desire. Alas, the Zone can only be accessed with the aid of an illegal “stalker” willing to lead clients around high security and through the Zone’s capricious and dangerous traps. This conceit has a quality both inevitable and ingenious, given resonant depth - as Dyer points out - by its cleverly disguised inversion of the Soviet gulag as well as by its eerily prescient anticipation of Chernobyl.

Given my own appreciation of the film, I’d expected a strong reaction to Dyer’s. What blindsided me was his informal, free-associative, intensely personal style. Upon the structure of a scene-by-scene summary of Stalker, Dyer applies material gleaned from articles about the film and director, then liberally decorates his narrative with, well, apparently whatever seems to cross his mind: cultural references high and low, observations ranging from keen insights to remotely tangential asides, and a plethora of autobiographical details, from fond memories of his movie-going childhood to speculation about whether he and his spouse should acquire a dog.

New York poet Frank O’Hara, in a delightful essay entitled “Personism: A Manifesto,” makes some observations about bringing the personal into one’s work, noting that one of Personism’s chief aims was

to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person…this would put “the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem [would be] correspondingly gratified.

I’m don’t know whether or not - in expressing his love of Stalker – Dyer had something like this in mind, but his injection of the personal into a work that in other aspects follows the recognizable form of an empirically-based, academic treatment of its subject, certainly moves his comments about Stalker squarely between himself and the reader, running the risk – as personal revelations do (particularly when writing about innermost desires, which as Dyer notes are difficult to identify even in oneself) – of alienating readers, leaving his book the only thing in the room (my room, in which I’d been reading Zona) to feel “correspondingly gratified.” I didn’t so much dislike this strategy as find it rubbing me wrong in maddening ways that only such a personal approach could - all the more irritating for its cutting close to my own sensitivities and for my failure to watch where I was stepping.

From the beginning Dyer and I got off on the wrong foot. I winced at Dyer’s occasionally leaden epiphanies (“The Zone is cinema”), name-dropping so thick it could form stalagmites, and a use of footnotes so wanton that it could out-Wallace David Foster Wallace. More to the honest point, I found (as though on a disastrous first date) many of Dyer’s tastes simply diverging from my own. He’s never seen The Wizard of Oz and asserts proudly that he feels no need to see it. He’s bored by Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. The Coen brothers are dispatched with a blunt blow from a single adjective: “witless.” Dyer laments the loss of a treasured shoulder bag, a brand I’ve always disliked for its almost fascistic aesthetic. Dyer rhapsodizes over the Burning Man festival and over dogs; as a San Francisco resident, I’m peeved by the rampant fetishism of both. Even concerning Stalker, I found – despite Dyer’s many fine observations – elements I love about the film that Dyer neglects or even fails to mention (one trivial example: the flora of the Zone in which the stalker takes a nap appears, in a blunt Tarkovskian witticism, to be a field of marijuana). How maddening for our egos, when a critic doesn’t appreciate the things we ourselves appreciate!

Roadside Picnic, for example, seems (to me) undeservedly underappreciated by Dyer, who only mentions the book in relating that Tarkovsky asked the Strugatskys to eliminate its science fiction aspects in their script for Stalker. Surely there are elements of the book worth tossing (those disinclined to like science fiction may never make it past the first unfortunate page), but Dyer leaves out the novel completely, circumventing (like Tarkovsky himself, I should add) one of its more genial ideas: that the strange phenomena of the Zone might simply be the result of litterbug extraterrestrials stopping for a roadside picnic before weaving off into the stars again, and the Zone itself not simply the consecrated space that it is in Tarkovsky’s religiously-infused vision, but perhaps a careless consequence of oblivious alien tourists who’ve had an impact like that in Ray Bradbury’s story “The Sound of Thunder,” in which a visitor to the past accidentally steps on a butterfly only to find the present irremediably altered upon his return. It’s a shame, as Roadside Picnic, despite its myriad faults, is in its own way as good as or even better than Stalker, less subtle but richer in humor, evocative of themes unexplored by the film, and delivering lightly some of what Tarkovsky delivers heavy-handedly (comparing Stalker and Roadside Picnic I can’t help but recall a curious rounded monolith in a hidden corner of Golden Gate Park that local new-agers had for years treated as a sacred altar, until the park service revealed that it was simply a discarded concrete traffic bollard). And there’s much in the novel of which Dyer might have made good use, such as a scene in which the stalker tosses a metal nut to determine the safest path to proceed through the Zone, only to see it suddenly pull hard to the side and disappear into the clay. To the stalker’s whispered question, “Did you see that?” one of his companions replies, “Only in the movies.”

But given the ample warnings that a more careful reader might have heeded before rushing into Zona, my complaints are but those of a bumbling tourist, one who, focused on seeing the Eiffel Tower, fails to appreciate the Grand Palais. After all, the title clearly promises more than merely “A Book About a Film” (and, with its string of prepositions, suggests an unreliable distancing from its real subject in the way that “my friend’s best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s uncle” does). Two epigraphs preface Zona, one from Albert Camus that almost screams an admonition - “After all, the best way of talking about what you love is to speak of it lightly” - and the other referencing the blindness that can occur from looking at something too intently. Readers might also skip ahead to the closing epigraph from novelist David Markham: “Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognizable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred? Nothing more than a read?” This coy apologia (with its nails-on-chalkboard use of “read” as a noun) comes too late, though there’s a more contrite, less expedient one in Zona where in a sudden self-interrogation Dyer addresses whether this hyper-personalized approach is even to his own taste, much less the reader’s. Here Dyer makes clear that he’s not so much condoning what he’s doing as running with it. Zona is a running, passionate appreciation of Tarkovsky’s film, but it’s even more an unfiltered experience of falling in love with a work of art, writing about it, and playing with writing about it and with the modes of writing about a work of art (after all, one of the stalker’s clients in the film is simply “Writer,” with an ego that invites problems in the Zone). I mean, some of these elements that so grated on me are just jokes, right? When Dyer deadpans that his own innermost desire might be for a three-way with two women, might he also be implying that perhaps the truest desire of the writer is simply to bring one’s personality into art, rather than submit to the constraints of trying to hide it? To admit one’s whole flawed being in responding to and writing about art, rather than adopt a dry voice of impersonal authority? To exaggeratedly use the candor of the personal to create a form that manifests the unavoidability of the personal? And to parody, simultaneously, both the impersonality of academic responses to works of art and the often overly personal ones of increasingly powerful popular opinion made possible by the Internet (for example, in, um, blogs run by amateurs, like this one) and, by this strange dialectic, come up with some new synthetic form? Perhaps. If so, Dyer may have found his room.

There’s a suggestion in Stalker, highlighted in Zona, that the “room” in the film, though, may simply be the bar where the stalker meets his clients prior to and following their Zone visit - that in fact they’ve never left the bar. It’s an appealing interpretation, one that helped me put aside my almost exclusively personal annoyance with Zona and think of it more like an animated, intellectually stimulating, slightly tipsy conversation in a pub with an animated, intellectually stimulating, slightly tipsy stranger. I can’t say I’m unhappy to have encountered him. I’m grateful for his meandering and insightful talk about a film we both admire. And the setting is surely more convivial than a stuffy lecture hall. But I could use another drink. Dyer can pay for this round.

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[i] Amateur Reader’s post on Roadside Picnic this week convinced me to dust off and try to salvage this previously abandoned post on Geoffrey Dyer’s book.