Books – Page 3 – My Own RE:public

Annie’s story …

One could I suppose wonder whether there comes a point where all the small and greater stories of any one life have been told – memories revisited and retold, enough secrets divulged. Should such a point of saturation exist (a hypothetical I may well argue against), it seems that, in the case of Annie Ernaux, it has not yet been reached.

*Das andere Mädchen* (2022) and *Der Junge Mann* (2023) pub. Suhrkamp

Corresponding with an excellent magazine piece (subscription) by Rachel Cusk in The New York Times last weekend, I had coincidentally borrowed two slight – very slight – installments in that aforesaid life; both published in translation only quite recently in Germany.

In Das andere Mädchen (L’autre fille, NiL Éditions, 2011), Ernaux gives life to the no-memory-of a sister she didn’t have; for the death from diphtheria of she named Ginette predated her own birth. Written (mostly) in a mini Briefroman form addressed to this at first unknown sister – and always aware of the irrationality of this exercise – that no-memory becomes essential to her real memories: of discovering as a ten year old, and only through chance, of Ginette’s existence, and the realization that Ginette’s death is for Annie existential (her parents only intended to have one child); of her parents who never spoke of their loss; of their fear of losing another; of their expectations for Annie, the replacement. It is almost as if her whole childhood was lived in the haunting shadow of another.

L’autre fille (only sixty or so pages) has not been translated into English. (Perhaps due in this instance to the smaller French publishing house rather than Gallimard?) A translation note unto myself: Given that the book builds on that overheard conversation which ends with Annie’s mother stating that Ginette was “viel lieber als die da”, that is, “much more lovable/better/preferable as [Annie]”. I can only say: good luck with that one!

Did I say: slight, very slight? Now, Der Junge Mann, is really very slight – about thirty pages, each formatted, shall we say, ‘opposite of condensed’. In the French original, Le jeune homme, Éditions Gallimard, 2022, this life fragment (you see I am grappling with what terminology to apply to these Ernaux-esque episodes!) was written in the last year of the last millennium and revolves about Annie Ernaux’s relationship with a thirty year younger student called only A. – Ernaux was in her mid-fifties – that has presumably not long ended. (Here, at UK Vogue – surprisingly! – is an excerpt.)

The age difference matters – not only in the public space (no, the French are not immune to the dictates of societal norms) but also in their private interactions; to paraphrase: i would like you to have my baby, he says at one point … well, that is just not going to happen, her obvious reply. (Though, she who had two children in her twenties and had never contemplated anymore, did find herself idly wondering what, with all the new technology and stuff, that would be like!) And age is often a determinate of the power balance. In this relationship, had the age difference been the other way round, the young man (then no longer young – even for a bloke !) would have had more options in which to exercise power (and at the same time without eliciting the glares of disapproval afforded an older woma), but against the norm here it is clear that Annie is control. She instigated this thing and she will end it.

The question remains: was this for Ernaux simply an arrangement of convenience (for her )? One that fulfilled not only her physical needs – for sexual intimacy and the rituals and familiarity of a partnership – but, importantly, her intellectual needs as a writer whose sharpest tool was that of memory? In that respect A. offered a convenient conduit to her past. He was from a similar working class provincial milieu (she says that, but Ernaux’s experience, born in 1940 and growing up in the immediate decades after, surely were substantially different to a young man born, say, in 1970?); as she did, he, too, is studying in Rouen with the minimum of resources and an uncertain future. Observing him at a place she once was, had a way of stimulating feelings and emotions that she had thought long left behind. The most startling of these the abortion that she had as a student, and in the hospital to be seen from A.’s window. The book ends with the end of the relationship and Annie having written down the trauma of that experience, published the next year in France as L’événement and written about by me in this post.

These works continue Annie Ernaux’s excavation of her person and her past; with each shifting the perspective of the story we thought we knew that came before. I would be surprised if they were to be the last.

English translations of Ernaux’s work are available through Seven Stories in the U.S. and Fitzcarraldo in the U.K.

May 14 2023: Some days later, prompted by a discussion elsewhere, I have found myself making a connection between Annie’s story about her sister (in L’autre fille) and that other which told about her abortion as a young woman (inspired during the time frame covered in Le jeune homme and explicitly written about in L’événement). Both of these forms of absence, have, it seems to me, moved Ernaux to reflect upon what is left behind in the gaps of unrealized, or not wholly so, lives. I have often talked about Ernaux’s writing of her own life, but perhaps, here, the imperative was to write and memorialize two ‘lives’ that were, to various degrees fleeting, but, nevertheless, profoundly influenced the course of her life.

What’s in a name

*RSC* production – Garrick Theatre, London, 2023

With Shakespeare on my mind of late, I take special note of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel Hamnet; recently premiered in Stratford and on its way to London in the autumn; and well reviewed, though both The Guardian and The New York Times, while mostly complimentary, suggest varying degrees of sentimentality. Oh, how I hate not being able to see these things!

Did anyone not like O’Farrell’s book? I dare say there were some. There are also some out there without a heart or, at least, to whom sentimentality is always an unreliable emotion: perhaps the theatrical production goes there, the book does not – unless one mistakes grief writ large for such.

I, then, was one of the most, or many, who enjoyed Hamnet – a lot really. I think it a fine work of the imagination; an example of one way through which a very good writer can grasp an idea that is, in itself, not absolutely original in terms of historical reading and scholarship but, by giving it an absolutely original emotional slant and a peculiar narrative twist, craft it into something quite ‘novel’.

Hamnet. Hamlet. What’s in a name? All or nothing at all? If one will, one can say “the name” is nigh on an anagram of “Hamnet” – or the other way around – save the duplicating of one pesky vowel – “the man”, who would have thunk it, is a perfect fit. But in good company with the Bard who, as with his contemporaneous creatives, all constantly inconsistent with their orthography; and Hamnet and Hamlet differ too by only one – this time a consonant; required only that it be only once lazily or hastily transcribed or mumbled quiet or loud. Still constant is the creeping duplicity. And duality – of people, of place – Hamnet or Judith, upon Avon or Thames.

Anne. Agnes. What’s in a name? And, when it is she who is the guiding light, the star of the ensemble here assembled? For so she is; it is filtered through the cloak of mystery in which the free-spirited Agnes is draped, that we encounter the spirit of the living Hamnet. Through Agnes’ eyes, Hamnet becomes more than just another boy-child lost to a past before history was made, barely more than an apparition; briefly there, then forever gone. Instead, his essence is captured and revealed; in death now channeled through a mother’s love and grief. But, it’s not just Hamnet that Agnes gifts us, but all the strangeness (and stagey-ness) of Elizabethan England, and the myriad of players cavorting in her fabled landscape – their talents, their habits, their secrets. Well be it that another wrote the words, and duly credited, but Agnes it is who provides the rhythm along with which the story beats and soars.

And the man? What of that other not named? He, the conjurer of words and stories destined for an immortality of sorts? A man with two lives, or as many lives as his quill and posterity has granted. Here, though, just a mortal husband and father. For this story, Agnes’ version is enough.

A longer interview with Maggie O’Farrell with The Observer is here on the The Guardian website.

International Booker

Further to my previous post, it is pleasing to note that Leïla Slimani will chair this year’s International Booker Prize, awarded to a work of translated fiction. And am just as pleased that amongst others she will be joined on the judging panel by Parul Sehgal, who I often read when she was at The New York Times and that I see now is a writer and critic at the New Yorker.

The longlist will be announced on 14th March, the shortlist of six books on 18th April and the winning title at a ceremony in London on Tuesday, 23rd May, 2023.

Just one night

Elsewhere I have written on Leïla Slimani, and will briefly do so again. Last night I read (as always in the German translation of Amelie Thoma with the title Der Duft der Blumen bei Nacht) Slimani’s slim ‘summing-up’ of her voluntary ‘locking-up’ – for one night only – in the Venetian Punta della Dogana; this being her contribution to her French publisher’s ongoing collection, “Ma nuit au musée”. Now, this, an idea that I initially found somewhat contrived – “Mickey Mouse” even, more suited to the ‘low’ culture of Disneyworld than the ‘high’ of the traditional European museum. Whereby that with vertical graduations of culture is relative and a matter of taste and circumstance: I remember, Orlando, circa. 1990, babe in arms, man at side; a memory as sunny and warm as the atmosphere in which it was created and lives still. Modest, perhaps, but nonetheless a highlight of this life.

Slimani herself is not absolutely convinced of the ‘higher’ purpose of the project nor of her qualification to speak on the contemporary art in the midst of which she will be stranded. But she is struggling with her novel and there is something about being alone, being ‘locked-up’, that is appealing enough to lead her to accept the proposal, reasoning her acquiescence as a consequence of her literary inheritance and ambitions; literary heroes – so many loners amongst them; her own unresolved conflict between an overwhelming desire for solitude and a peculiar restlessness. All this may well be so, but during her night of self-imposed confinement, other more personal motivations come to the fore.

*View of Punta della Dogana from the Bacino di San Marco.*

So it is that Slimani’s meditation on her own particular art of writing is embellished with those of others – for instance, Tolstoy, Woolf, Rushdie, Adnan – and, on this night, run parallel with her confrontation with forms of visual art that are not easy and are open to interpretation. And her interpretations can not be but reflective of her experience living between worlds; the Morocco of her childhood and the France of her adulthood, and always the Francophone which is her linguistic home and the Arabic which was never gifted her – but the essence of which is always there, somewhere.

When considering the 17th century building in which she now finds herself and the greater plight of Venice and the Notre Dame fire in Paris on the previous day, Slimani reflects upon the transient nature of cities and the structures that inhabit them. And she wonders where the life-enriching transcendent is to be found in an increasingly secular society, when religion and the sacred is abused, demolished? Always there in the poetic, in literature, she suggests. And whether with her own turn of phrase or extending upon those of others, her musings are thoughtful and clearly formulated – and very revealing of her writing life and the price paid for her obsession.

And personally revealing. Perhaps this was not Slimani’s intent, but somewhere through that night she is struck by the irony that she should choose this bizarre form of confinement for just one night, whilst years previously her father had been confined, imprisoned – no choice there, and unjustly so claims his daughter. And even when not actually deprived of their freedom, there was a generation of Moroccans like her parents who had been condemned to a life sentence anyway – a life in the shadow of colonialism, lives lived in a land claimed by others. Slimani writes with understanding and empathy of their plight – without reproach nor bitterness; only too aware of the later freedoms granted to her through circumstance.

We know Leïla Slimani returns to Paris, freed – for a time, at least – of the not so brutal, but also not trivial, shackles that freedom brings, and with the realization that in the whole scheme of things her burdens are governed by choice – and are to be endured or thrown asunder. She is fit again to write of those which are greater; borne by others in another place, another time. Tell another story. (The second of the trilogy, Regardez-nous danser, was published last year.)

Pugin

Should one not be adequately informed, by virtue of professional or personal interest, in the social and cultural history of Victorian England (and the Georgian that preceded it), one could be forgiven for not easily placing the name Pugin (says she absolving herself!). That is, to be precise: Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin^[a] (/ˈpjuːdʒɪn/PEW-jin; 1 March 1812 – 14 September 1852). And so pasted from Wikipedia; for, having come to the end of a fabulous biography, I now realise I have been saying – in my head anyway – quite correctly (by chance!) the first syllable but consistently mispronouncing the last syllable with a hard ‘g’. And for reasons I can’t say, for there is that rule dependent upon the following vowel and in days gone I certainly had a penchant for an icy gin and tonic of a summer evening. Too long a stay in Germany perhaps, where the g of Germany and gin is confined to words derived from other languages – like, for instance, ‘Germany’ and ‘gin’!

As mentioned previously, in a weaker moment last year I relented and, despite my modest budget, subscribed to the London Review of Books. The reading of a random piece here and there or a rare purchase at a Hauptbahnhof en route from here to there had become a bit tiresome. And I haven’t regretted doing so; even when some articles tend to veer too left of my (fading) scope of vision. While sometimes delivery has been tardy (unfortunately a digital only sub. is not offered so it is always the case that I have an online version for a significant time before the hard copy turns up) and this year has seen a hefty price hike, I am sticking with it for the moment. During the year gone I have discovered some really excellent pieces of writing – from people known to me and not, about subject matter with which I am familiar and that which I’m not.

Rosemary Hill is an example of such an ‘unknown’ (to me) with whom I have been glad to become acquainted. As it transpires, Hill is not only a regular contributor to LRB, but a widely respected writer and cultural historian. Early in the year gone, I was impressed by a ‘Diary’ piece in which Hill, inspired by the 1921 census becoming available and an interest in discovering her father as the baby he then was and the family that surrounded him, explores her familial roots in South London and in doing so vividly illustrates the conditions under which the ‘working-classes’ lived at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Then later I listened to a series of podcasts hosted by Rosemary Hill on Romantic Britain coinciding with her new book Time’s Witness (I await the paperback – remember, the modest…meager budget – ordered and due in a couple of weeks) which led to the discovery of her 2008 Wolfson History Prize winning book God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (2007), of which an immaculate paperback copy fell into my hands.

The Oppermans

One hundred years ago, in 1923, Germany was grappling with the instability of the new constitutional republic patched together out of the ashes of a world war and the accompanying chorus of public unrest and grievances – real and imagined; the economy was wracked by reparation payments and hyperinflation; French troops occupied the Rhineland and now the Ruhr valley and a fledgling radical nationalist party in Bavaria (with enough thugs in its midst and an Austrian with a talent for oratory – if you want to call it that – now at its helm) was stirring up resentment and planning (not very well!) a putsch of sorts. Ten years later the events described in Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel “The Oppermans” that I write about below are realized – the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 ended in the triumph of the Nazis rise to supremacy and the beginning of some of the darkest days of history.

I knew who Lion Feuchtwanger was. I knew him to be one of the German (and Jewish) literati to get out just in the nick of time. I knew him to be one of those intellectuals to have found safe haven first in the south of France and then in the US; in his case amongst an exile community in Pacific Palisades that included Thomas Mann and Adorno. And that his home, the “Villa Aurora”, exists still – now as an artists residence and a place of cultural exchange and learning.

And, until now, I had not read him at all. But, encouraged by a piece written by Joshua Cohen in the NYT last year, that is, in fact, his introduction to a new publication (for which he is apparently responsible for) of the English translation of The Oppermanns, not long ago I sought out and read the most recent German edition entitled Die Geschwister Oppermann. The Geschwister being all the siblings of a privileged and successful German-Jewish family in Berlin: Gustav, a writer of the literary establishment and bon vivant, and the main protagonist from whom the narrative springs, Martin, who runs the family furniture business, Edgar, a brilliant doctor, and Klara, married to a Polish Jew with American passport and the best connections in industry and finance.

As literature in the highest sense of the word, one should not attempt to feign too high a regard. There are portions that have been written very carelessly indeed, without an editorial eye and committed revision – inconsistencies, repetitions, messy dialogue abound. Short sentences are fine, but only up to a point. And when one too often wonders whether that sentence – or something not dissimilar – has not previously been read – and it has? That Feuchtwanger was operating in screen-writing mode (as suggested by Cohen and elsewhere) is a good explanation for the often disjointed form; one which may very well work in drafting, with a camera at the fore, a curt: cut to … and a continuity ‘girl’ at one’s beck and call. It may also account for what I thought the exaggerated, often repetitive, descriptive passages. Though I did wonder, also, whether here was not a style characteristic of a lot of German writers of this generation who, unlike Thomas Mann and few others, didn’t have the luxury of working alone for literary publication, but had to also shuffle between theater, film, journalism, perhaps, academia.

And that is where one gets to why this book is special, and its shortcomings so easily forgiven. Feuchtwanger is not a stylist, absolutely no Th. Mann, but style here is not the point. Literary inadequacies in form are hardly to be wondered at considering the circumstances and urgency under which this novel came to be. Writing, as Cohen says, in “real time”, Feuchtwanger’s novel is the only work that I have read that so portrays – in narrative form, and as it happens – the end game in the Nazis diabolical rise to power, and being played out against the backdrop of an already fractured German society – many elements of which were willing or passive participants.

And I mean the collapse of an entire society – its laws, its norms, its moral fabric. Only in retrospect may one presume that here was a disintegration just waiting to happen. From its beginnings in late 1932 as Gustav celebrates his 50th birthday at his Grunewald villa with family and friends, the novel is bound to the chronology of events leading to the Machtergreifung in January 1933 and what happened next – in Berlin (knowing well enough the particular topography in western Berlin that the novel traverses, added an extra impetus to my reading and its reception), in the provinces, in and out of exile. That that city which has so flourished in these last decades as I write, just as it had so embraced modernity and all its hallmarks of tolerance and indulgence a century ago whilst chaos reigned on the streets and in all the institutions of the young Weimar Republic, could have degenerated so swiftly is a potent reminder of, not just the inherent fragility of almost all social structures, but also the prejudices they conceal and opportunism they encourage.

A tragic tale, a cautionary tale for the ages. Irrespective of its deficits, The Oppermans is an important and immensely disturbing book that should be read for its exposition of the lies told – and those we tell ourselves still – and where they ultimately lead.

Salman Rushdie update

On a number of occasions recently I have searched for an update on Salman Rushdie’s condition following the brutal attack upon him at a literary event in rural New York in the summer just gone – and mostly have came up short. His (super)agent, Andrew Wylie, did divulge the extent of Rushdie’s injuries, which include the loss of an eye, during an El País interview – reported upon here at The Guardian.

Now, and without having to take the initiative, on Radio Four’s Today programme this morning, Mishal Husain spoke with Alan Yentob, a long time friend of Salman Rushdie (at about 2:19:00 – usually available for about 30 days). We are told that very recently Rushdie has “listened in” at a couple of special readings of his works by friends and colleagues, amongst them Yentob, who says that Rushdie is working hard at getting well, that he remains optimistic and his humor as razor sharp as ever.

Very good news indeed.

And … his new book, called Victory City, finished before he sustained such dreadful injuries is due out in February 2023. Yentob actually said January, but I have checked at Penguin Random House and it is indeed February 7 in the US and February 9 in the UK. From what Yentob says and following the publisher’s blurb we will be taken back anew to Rushdie’s literary roots in a magical, mystical, shape shifting India – this time to the 14th century and to the tale of a little girl possessed by a powerful goddess and sent on a divine mission to guide the fate of a great city and expose and conquer the patriarchy. A mission that will span centuries, and be interwoven with the city’s rise and fall and with it that of its rulers and its citizens.

Now if that doesn’t sound like the Salman Rushdie that gave us Midnight’s Children – who could believe it! – forty odd years ago.

Last waltz in Vienna

The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle – by David Edmonds.

An immensely interesting book just read in German translation. What begins as a lively intellectual romp of the highest niveau ends – as one always knows it will – in animosity and some enmity, in flight and exile and the tragedy of war and the holocaust and, for one, in his murder.

*written by David Edmonds, pub. C.H. Beck (2021)*

The Vienna Circle was a group of scientists and philosophers that formed in the first decades of the 20th century; meeting and publishing regularly in changing constellations and degrees of exclusivity, united by a shared antipathy to the metaphysical zeitgeist and in search of a more stringentphilosophy of science based on modern logic (inspired firstly by Ernst Mach and later by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus) and an empirical methodology (finding fulfillment only under the stringency of verificationism) – to become known as logical empiricism. Their ranks included people like: Otto Neurath, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gödel, Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann …and, yes, Moritz Schlick … And in their orbit: Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Alfred Tarski …. Many were political, many Jewish or with Jewish associations of some sort and to various degrees.

As the people, so not the place. It is an irony of fate (and for some just a matter of birth), that this exquisite group of argumentative rational thinkers should congregate in Vienna, a place that by the 1930s was being increasingly consumed by unreason, as the dark shadows of nationalism and antisemitism fell about them – from within and soon from without with the Anschluß into the German Reich in 1938. Edmonds’ book distinguishes itself in its conjuring of the growing atmosphere of, first, disquiet and then angst, often illustrated through vignettes surrounding the main players and their complicated and sometimes compromised situations.

Women don’t get the short shrift by Edmonds either. Notable is the tenacity of Rose Rand (born in Lemberg – now Lviv), as a young woman actively participating within the ‘circle’ (including the writing of protocols) during the early thirties as Austria imploded, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered in her émigré status as she struggled to keep her ambitions alive – making ends meet mostly through teaching and translating the works of others – first in England and then the United States where she died – alone, as she seems to have been most of her life – in 1980.

Rand didn’t leave Austria until 1939 and it was then – or so it is presumed- with the assistance of another woman: the philosophy professor Susan Stebbing. As apparent by the fore linked SEP entry, she, a formidable intellect who made major contributions to analytical philosopher – and an argumentative voice in the logical positivism debate.

And then there is the remarkable Tess Simpson. As the long time secretary of the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) and its successor the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), Simpson was instrumental in helping many of the Vienna Circle (amongst many others) find safe haven. [This organization continues their work to this day as Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA)] David Edmonds has previously written on Simpson for The Jewish Chronicle here, and his 2017 Radio 4 documentary, “Miss Simpson’s Children” is (as I write) still available.

For me, alone an introduction to these three women made this book a wonderful read. But there is, of course, so much more.