Category: Fiction

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.

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.

pub. Aufbau Taschenbuch 2008
pub. McNally Editions 2022
German and U.S. publications

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.

The long and short of it …

Of the Booker fiction prize 2022, that is. I feel like I’ve been neglectful of all the other works that made it to the last or the last but one round. So here is the so-called long list and the short listed finalists. I have read but one – Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!

Long List announced on July 26:
Short list announced on September 6:

The winner we now know.

I should say that the Booker website is an absolute treasure trove, including reading guides for the shortlisted books, quizzes that may (or may not) help one decide on what to read (or read not), information on the judges (Neil MacGregor was Chair this year), extracts, interviews and videos. And a featured list of works from Hilary Mantel as a tribute to her place in Booker history, in British writing – of their own history but not only.

The sort-of-Booker prize

The Booker prize for fiction 2022 was announced on a special edition of Front Row on BBC Radio 4 last night (The Guardian report here) and presented by the Duchess of Dings Bums … I mean the Queen Consort … (forgive me Camilla, for you are famously a real reader!) to the Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I neither know the author nor his work, but I am secretly – well obviously not so secretly – pleased that it was not awarded (again) to a US publication. As I have said before, the US have enough of their own gongs and the anglophile book world deserves a space beyond those shores and the reach of a few powerful media conglomerates. On the later, it is also striking that Karunatilaka’s book is published by a small UK independent press – Sort of Books.

Exploring the violent insurrections of 1980s Sri Lanka, The Guardian review from the summer suggests a work written in a magic realism tradition that blends the spiritual with the profane, sardonic humor with brutal reality, and which brings immediately Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to my mind. It is 1990 and the Maali of the title is a photographer – and he is dead. But he is a soul that has not found peace, and with now one mission: to expose the crimes of the decade gone with the evidence that he amassed during his professional (and earthly) life.

From his Front Row appearance, Karunatilaka comes across as a humourful and very interesting man indeed, and his website informs on a really spectacularly successful life – and I mean that to mean a life well-lived. And besides, he loves cricket. And, I will be reading this book.

And the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature goes to…

…at about 16:00 min

Annie Ernaux!

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2022 is awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux,

“for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

Press Release
6 October 2022

A very short formal announcement I must say – and not as punctual as one is use to (presumably their winner could not be contacted; follows, she wasn’t sitting by the phone! is that a diss? hope so!). Here is the biobibliography (that’s a mouthful!) on the Nobel website (and as pdf). How delighted I am I need not say; for, on Ernaux, I have said enough in the past.

Out of France

Patrick Modiano & annie Ernaux

Read in the last days, two of my most favored French writers. Two novels with significant differences and some intrinsic similarities. Both modest in length and profound in content.

Firstly, Patrick Modiano’s newest work Chevreuse (Gallimard, 2021), read by me as Unterwegs nach Chevreuse (Hanser, 2022) and with an English translation due to be published as Scene of the Crime by Yale University Press next year.

I remember repeating – to only then deny – the oft heard criticism that one Modiano is some how not much different to the one that came before, and it would not surprise if the same arguments are not still to be heard in respect of Chevreuse. I even admit to brief moments of déjà vu, during which I did wonder whether I hadn’t strayed into familiar territory, situation. But why should I not, for that uncertainty is essential to memory. So one reads on, and is again seduced by that particular atmospheric that Modiano effortlessly conjures; imbued with images of the past; of person and place; haunting and defining each future until they too bow to the dictates of time.

Out of the city, westward beyond the 16th arrondissement with its bourgeoisie enclave of Auteuil on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne and into the idyllic country side of the Chevreuse via the Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne in Jouy-en-Josas. These are the main places of the journey that our writing protagonist Jean Bosmans takes us on as he excavates his childhood, his more youthful years and some intermittent; in search of the past and in the interest of his literary form – and that of Modiano; the third person, if you will, in command of the narrative. (A choice of perspective that perhaps allows for some distance – whether reliable is another matter.)

Typically (for Modiano), this narrative exists in multiple time frames – the elderly writer Bosmans in approximately the here and now, his younger self during the mid-1960s, and the child of fifteen years previously. Whereby it is those middle years that drive the particulars of the story; those youthful years of first experiences and great expectations. And, it is no wonder, for they are his formative years as a writer, and he is beginning to understand that one of the greatest tools for his craft lay in the fusion of memory – that is, lived experience and emotion as it roots itself in the subconscious and takes on its on life over time – and the creative processes of imagination.

Chance meetings that aren’t (for instance, with the lovely Camille, incongruously called “tête de mort”, about which I note an English translation predicament: “dead head” is very literal but perhaps too much “Grateful Dead” for my tastes!), a sinister cast of characters with changing names, too many coincidences, too many echoes from blurred childhood memories, all stimulate the young writer’s imagination, and all the time Modiano, with his wonderful gift for blending the stations of his own life with those of his fictive, half-fictive characters, is creating a new reality – for the page, the reader and maybe even himself.

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