“Tyll” by Daniel Kehlmann, original pub. Rowohlt, Germany, 2017
Coming to my notice via The New York Times is publication of the English translation of Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll. Only a couple of years old in original, I seem to recall it as being well received, and ‘Daniel’ is a bit of a “Publikum” darling anyway – hence the familiarity of a first name being enough to identify him by many literary minded sorts in Germany. My interest piqued, I have just visited the local library and duly got myself a copy; begging the question exactly where to fit it into my reading agenda!
Coincidently some of my favourite UK podcasts have recently lured Kehlmann into their studios for interesting chats that further whet my appetite. Firstly, the Arts & Ideas podcast available directly from BBC Radio 3 or at Apple Podcasts, and then there is the Times Literary SupplementFreedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon podcast also at Apple.
For a little more context and historical background, here are the Wikipedia entries for the Thirty Years’ War and Till Eulenspiegel. I’m very much looking forward to the read.
My paperback edition ( Bloomsbury Publishers, 2018)
Wanting to make clear that I do read beyond the precious canon of sorts that I have created for myself; Kamila Shamsie’s highly acclaimed Home Fire comes to mind as a recent example. I must say I often shy at a crescendo of superlatives, so whilst I do agree this is a terrific read I don’t necessarily consider it an extraordinary literary highlight as some would have it – just a really good contemporary novel (finding its way onto the BBC list of “Novels That Shaped Our World”) with a lot more depth than most; exploring the themes of belonging (or not) to nation, family, religion, and what is to be done with the divided loyalties that may almost certainly arise in our globalised world amongst the many of us moving on from the place of our birth. And courageous it is, especially as a British-Pakistani Muslim woman, to write a novel in which the jihadi, ISIS, and so-called “home-grown terrorism” are central themes. And the latter leads one to consider all the connotations to be imagined in the title; “home” is just one of those words I guess – where the heart is, where fires are kept burning, that has an Office and a Secretary. And who has the right to claim a place as home, and who has the right to take it away. And how many homes can any one person have. A concept I would suggest that may very well have lost its place in our contemporary world – too tainted by a multitude of identity crises gone haywire.
Spoken in the varying participant voices, the narrative is well paced and succinct. A British Muslim family is drawn, through circumstance or design, into the cesspool of Islamic fanaticism, and must navigate the conflicting loyalties of family and state, tradition and reason. So confronted, the sisters, Isma and Aneeka, react differently in their attempts to extricate their brother, Parvaiz, from his dangerous predicament – Isma, the senior member of this fractured family, places hope in the machinations of the state, and Aneeka, the younger and Parvaiz’s twin, distrusting of government and its institutions, and its prejudices, either real or perceived, seeks to intervene directly. Neither woman will save Parvaiz, but his death is only the prologue – for Aneeka, if she can not save her brother’s life, is determined to save his death.
Bringing home Parvaiz’s body becomes for Aneeka more than just a religious ritualistic gesture, but an act of defiance against the State that deprived her brother of his statehood and right of burial. The personification of that despised entity is satisfied by Karamat Lone, who has seemingly conquered all the societal and institutional hurdles placed before him and risen to the political heights as new Home Secretary; at the expense of being ostracised from the Muslim community. The relationship Aneeka forms with Lone’s son, Eamon, in the first instance as a means to secure Parvaiz safe return, is ultimately the fatal link between two families, two traditions on collision course.
Antigone in front of the dead Polynices by Nikiforos Lytras 1865
We know – from author, blurb, review – that this is a modern adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, and a reading of the tragedy, or even a summary of, confirms that. Shamsie is not alone in turning to the classics as a narrative device, but her elegant fitting of a very contemporary story within the frame of an ancient drama works I think very well. Striking are the parallels between Antigone’s and Aneeka’s respective acts of civil disobedience and the accepted consequences. One may wonder that, two and half thousand odd years after Sophocles, the repatriation of the dead to their nearest and dearest remains a matter of contention – and a tool of statecraft.
This must be it surely it! The TLS podcast Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon has a bonus episode (an Apple link is the best I can do) of their extended interview with Francesca Wade about book Square Haunting that I have previously blogged on. Nothing here that she hasn’t necessarily said elsewhere, but just another nudge in the direction of reading about this really interesting collective (of four people – women) that Wade has put together (in one place – a London square).
Until I read the book, one final thought, it occurs to me how often Virginia Woolf uses “haunting” and associated words – things like “my old haunts” or “something/somebody haunted by” and of course “haunted houses” – and there is a wonderful 1927 essay entitled Street Haunting (I would guess this inspires Wade’s book title) which I know from The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays a collection published in 1942 by Leonard Woolf after his wife’s death, and which takes us on a delightful walk of London – and at the haunting hour! (A beautiful 1930 US edition is at The British Library, and here digitally.) I will keep this in mind as an idea to be pursued further, because I think there is a lot more to be said about Woolf and the ghosts that haunted her, and those that haunt us all.
Just published and brought to my notice by The Guardian, this interesting podcast from The Spectator (and embedded below) informs further on Francesca Wade’s just published first book Square Haunting (Faber, January 2020).
For the curious, the five eminent women are Virginia Woolf (writer, 1882–1941) Hilda Doolittle (or H.D. writer, poet 1886–1961), Dorothy L Sayers (writer, 1893–1957), Eileen Power (economist, historian 1889–1940) and Jane Harrison (classicist, 1850–1928), and the place is Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, London. Wade presumably explores the changing role of women at the beginning of the 20th century through these exemplary lives, and in doing so discovers shared aspects of their lives.
Without referring to either book or podcast, off the top of my head I actually know of one obscure more than crossing of paths, being that between Woolf and Harrison. Virginia Woolf’s diaries (favourite often returned to reading of mine) reveal something of the relationship between her friend Hope Mirrlees and Mirrlees’ former tutor and then partner Harrison — their shared domestic and working lives and travels abroad. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in fact published Harrison’s memoirs in 1925.
Also, while Eileen Power may draw a blank with some (or many) I have actually come across Medieval English Nunneries in another context … but there must surely be more to tell, and I am looking forward to reading about it.
Always awaited by me with anticipation, The Guardian‘s annual literary calendar; including anniversaries, adaptations, and of course new book releases – from which I have chosen just some that I am particularly looking forward to.
Square Haunting by Francesca Wade (Faber) (Jan.)
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Hamish Hamilton) (Feb.)
Amnesty by Aravind Adiga (Picador) (Feb.)
Here We Are by Graham Swift (Scribner) (Feb.)
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel (4th Estate) (March)
A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry (Faber) (March)
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder) (March)
The Death of Comrade President by Alain Mabanckou (Serpent’s Tail) (March)
Summer by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) (July)
How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division by Elif Shafak NF (Wellcome) (July)
The Mission House by Carys Davies (Granta) (Aug.)
The Gun, the Ship and the Pen by Linda Colley, NF history (Profile) (Aug.)
Trio by William Boyd (Viking) (Oct.)
Snow by John Banville (Faber) (Oct.)
Tom Stoppard by Hermione Lee, NF biography (Faber) (Oct.)
The Mark of Cain by Margaret MacMillan, NF Reith Lectures (Profile) (Oct.)
Alex Preston from The Observer bemoans the mediocre year just gone, but offers good cheer for the year to come. Here are some of his suggestions that particularly interest me:
The long awaited and highly anticipated finale to Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwelltrilogy, The Mirror and the Light(4th Estate, March) – under strict embargo!
Hamnet(Tinder Press, March) by Maggie O’Farrell – “an […] imagination of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and the untold story of his wife, “Agnes” Hathaway.”
Apeirogon(Bloomsbury, February), by Colum McCann “…ambitious formally and thematically, taking on the Israel-Palestine conflict in a work that is both spectacularly inventive and grounded in hard, often brutal fact. It is about grief and forgiveness, about family and politics… If you can read it without sobbing, you’re a monster.”
Sebastian Barry’s A Thousand Moons (Faber, March). “Set in the wake of the American civil war, it tells the story of Winona, a brave, bruised orphan from the Lakota tribe whose new life on a Tennessee farmstead is threatened by the past.”
“…the final part of Ali Smith’sera-defining seasonal quartet, Summer (Penguin, July)”
KateGrenville’s A Room Made of Leaves(Text, July)(“..which I’ve read and it’s every bit as good as The Secret River” says Preston – let us hope!)
A new essay by Zadie Smith in the current October 24 2019 issue of The New York Review of Books, and for the moment at least online, eloquently argues against a particularly stringent interpretation of cultural appropriation prevalent in the literary world in recent times and the strident sometimes virulent debates that inevitably ensue, and pleads instead for a fiction that dares to presume rather than contain, that is driven by the imagination rather than the manifest self and finds its voice in revealing what it doesn’t know.
How I have longed for an argument along these lines to be so articulated.
I did want to mention the French writer Annie Ernaux. As in the case of Patrick Modiano, my recent readings of two of her books have been in German translation – and for the same reasons: mediocre French skills and as a matter of convenience. Firstly, some months back, having recently come to my attention through some very interesting reviews, I took to a hand a new German translation of La Place (“Le Platz”) at my local library; having recently come to my attention through some very interesting reviews in mostly German media. First published in 1984 (there is a 1992 English translation: “A man’s place”), I now know it to be representative of the very special narrative form with its highly (or absolutely?) autobiographical elements that Ernaux has chosen. Perhaps “autofiction” is the correct terminology these days, though absent the “fiction” that also doesn’t seem quite right.
La Place is a memorial of sorts to Ernaux’s father – his struggles, disappointments and modest gains – from hard, impoverished circumstances at the beginning of the 20th century, through farm and manual labour and two wars to the relative comfort afforded by a small family and “property” – in provincial northern France; reflected upon by the adult daughter now in her twenties, wife and mother, who has returned to the stupefying closeness of her childhood home that she so eagerly fled in her father’s last days. She too has moved on in life, but further, away from the hard-earned “place” in society that her father fought for and won and defended and had pride in. This narrator, this Annie, had no pride in this “place” from where she came, but irritated by her estrangement from her parents and her roots, she speaks to us and to herself from her father’s “place”, attempting to understand the nuances and conventions that erect then maintain the barriers of class. But, as much as the subject here may well be the father, his story is very much just a building block to her own autobiographical quest; in channeling the father, Annie Ernaux is on a journey, sometimes painful, of coming back to herself.
Now in the last days I have finished reading Mémoire de fille , in German of course as “Erinnerung eines Mädchens”, and also from my wonderful locallibrary. Published in original only in 2016, (and not yet in English) it fills in gaps, things touched upon but not fully explained in her 2008 and critically acclaimed work Les Années (Ger. “Die Jahre” Eng. “The Years” both pub. 2017). Not having read that work (yet!), I can only relate from other sources that it was there that Ernaux conjures (for the first time I think) this very particular voice that also characterizes Mémoire de fille. I must say I was a few pages in before I realised that the “I” (“ich” “Je”) was absent. She takes herself out of time and place; as a third person viewer to her own biography. She objectifies herself so to speak. She hovers over this eighteen year old that she once was and is both detached and intimately involved, as irritated and sympathethic as any reader may be. She is both unforgiving and non-judgemental of this her former self. The time span is not great; Ernaux approaches a memory of a just a few weeks in the Summer of 1958 that was consequential and a brief snap shot of the immediate couple of years that followed, dissects the shame that wasn’t there until it became memory, tests the boundaries of belonging, rejection and reconciliation. This literary feat of disassociation that Annie Ernaux achieves in her writing is a triumph over the demons that haunt us all.
I didn’t mean to write so much here. I need to read some more, especially the much feted Les Années, and get closer to the writer Annie Ernaux. Coincidentally today I read a bit of a Q & A with Zadie Smith in The Guardian in which she mentions Ernaux as a favourite: “… and Annie Ernaux changed my mind about French writing. In that I got very excited about it again”– that doesn’t surprise me at all. And Wikipedia alerted me to this excellent piece in The Paris Review by Laura Elkin that seems to affirm some of the things I was thinking about, including my genre confusion, and gives me much more to think about.
