A Time of Gifts (Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1977)

An Oxford student hitch-hiking from London to Constantinople on foot, living alternately in ditches and chateaux, in the pre-war stirrings of 1933 Europe. Written nearly 45 years after the fact, the narrative is reconstructed through diaries and notes, memories and research. It is quite the achievement, and I’m amazed at how much Fermor manages to fit into these 296 pages.

A Time of Gifts has been a book I’ve wanted to read for several years. Ever since I first heard of it, I’ve had an image of it as a sort of gold standard of travel writing. It haw often been mentioned in the same breath as Robert Byron‘s “Road to Oxiana” (1937) and Rebecca West‘s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (1941). Reading more about Patrick Leigh Fermor’s life makes him seem like a larger-than-life character, who was both an accomplished writer, a war general and a high-life socialite. I also learned that he played a decisive role in a military operation in the Greek islands during World War Two – and that he was called a “real-life James Bond”.

The book is a rather straight-forward retelling of the route from “the Hook of Holland” to Budapest (the tale of the journey was intended to fill a trio of books, two of which were finished at the time of Fermor’s death, and the concluding one was posthumously published in note-form in 2013). Certain episodes are glossed over with reference to details having fallen away with the sands of time, and other episodes prompt associations to events later in Fermor’s life, which gives the narration a sense of exciting back and forth, which is novel to me. I can recall other retellings of youthful adventure, like Hemingway‘s “A Moveable Feast”, or Hugo Claus‘ “Een zachte verlieling”, but the jumpiness in Fermor is more dynamic. And the erudition! I can hardly keep up with all the kings, wars, monks, barons, Romans and poets. And to think that he was only a teenager at the time. Some of the ideas must have been formulated ex-post facto, probably many of the thoughts on art history and architecture. The prose is also filled with to me unknown or unusual words, and I find myself wanting to be an Englishman all of a sudden.

Some of the descriptions of nature lose my attention, but on the whole it is an engaging read, giving the reader a glimpse into a bygone era of interwar upheaval, still in the process of updating 19th century modes of existence into modernity mode. I learned a lot reading this book, and am grateful to Patrick Leigh Fermor for having had the fortitude to write it.

Eleventh Novel, Book Eighteen (Dag Solstad, 1992)

Eleventh novel, book eighteen (In the original Norwegian “Ellevete roman, bok atten”, Dag Solstad, 1992)

This existentialism-tinged Norwegian novel really transported me. It’s about a middle-aged man and his ordinary life, that he somehow tries to change. He seems quite detached from life, and expresses disappointment with his existence. At first I thought it would deal with mid-life crises and revolve around themes of reinventing oneself after the first half of life failed (as in Saul Bellow’s “Seize the Day”), but it turned out to be something much more weird. The events of the story is described as “a great No”, meaning the man says “No” to his existence, which calls into mind Enrique Vila-Matas ingenious book-essay on “the writers of the No” (“los escritores del No”).
The first 40 or 50 pages or so describe a man having left his second wife (although they never married) and gives a detailed account of how his life was before he moved in with this woman, who is called Turid, and how life was with her. He had a two year old son when he left his first wife to live with Turid, and now he leaves her too. During his time in this town where they have lived for almost 15 years they found time to be active in the local theatre group, which provided them with friends and (in the case of Turid) opportunities to flirt. This doesn’t really matter much later in the book, but it sets up a foundation of Björn Hansen’s life. But he is now on his own. He takes walks with his friends, tries to adjust to his new situation. One day, he receives a letter from his son, who asks if he can live with him as he is about to enroll as a student in his particular town. The novel then veers into an interesting portion that discusses his son, how his son is unlike him, and how he fails to understand him. The last part of the novel, about his “project”, details about which I won’t divulge much to spare a presumptive reader any spoilage, is quite possibly the weakest part. It seems too far-fetched, a bit out of step with the admittedly hazy and uncertain prose style of the book. I liked all the details about the son, it reminded me of certain details I picked up in films I saw growing up. I also was impressed by the writer Dag Solstad’s ability to describe the dynamics of a theatre group so believably. This book has since publication 1992 seen two sequels (published in 2010 and 2019, respectively). Final note: I don’t understand why they accepted this clunky title. Is it to convey a sense of meaninglessness, that the author shares with his protagonist?

Two who Love Each Other (Tove Ditlevsen, 1960)

Two who love each other (inthe original Danish “to som elsker hin anden”, Tove Ditlevsen, 1960)

This Danish novel about adultery is constructed as a love triangle, whose chapters alternate between the wife Inga, the husband Torben, and his 19-year old lover Eva. I get the feeling that the writer Tove Ditlevsen has experienced all three of these situations in her real life and is therefore good at describing the feelings of each of the characters very well. Sometimes it really shows that this is written almost 60 years ago, with depictions of male behavoir that wouldn’t be accepted after third wave feminism, I guess. Interesting to read a writer that has been so talked about, although I wasn’t thrilled to learn that she has been compared to Kerstin Thorvall. What is an American equivalent to Tove Ditlevsen?
I like the poetic style it is written in, with lots of beautiful similes and thoughts woven into the text. Ditlevsen started as a poet, after all. I was a bit wary of her writing before, because I got the sense that she was the type of writer who liked to get drunk and then write about all the mistakes that are the results of her debauchery, a genre that I’m not really all that interested in. Life writing – is that a kind of nomer designed to belittle its referent?

The Summer Book (Tove Jansson, 1972)

This book has found an audience outside of its native Finland, and is a sweet story of a grandmother and the daughter of her son, who keep each other company on an island in the Finnish archipelago one summer. They learn from each other’s temperaments and inform each other with new perspectives. I can’t recall that I’ve yet read a book focussing on that most precious of intergenerational bonds, the grandparent-grandchild relationships, but this one does it very well. It also captures the sense of the Nordic summer very well, since summer has a very important function in an area that is basically cold and dark three quarters of the year. Each chapter is its own little vignette about something that happens as the summer progresses, and the novel ends with the onset of autumn. Jansson is adept at finding apt wordings to describe intangible mood changes and atmospheric shifts. One of my favorites is “they each settled in to their own silence” to describe when two people fall awkwardly silent. It is also exotic to read some of the expressions and vocabulary of Swedish-Finns as a Swedish Swede, because they have certain funny archaisms and a whole dictionary of the own. My biggest take-away with this book however, was the realization, mid-book, that my own (as yet unborn-but-growing) child will grow up with three grandparents, none of which will be my father.

Bartleby & Co (Enrique Vila-Matas, 2000)

Vila-Matas is the name of an imaginative Spanish writer who has produced a string of fascinating little novels appealing to lovers of literature. This one, my first taste of this singular Spaniard, is about the Bartlebyes of literature. A Bartleby is the name Vila-Matas gives writers who suddenly stop writing, like the Melville character of his short story Bartleby the Scrivener, and his famous line “I prefer nor to”. It is filled with references to lesser-known European writers from the 19th and 20th century and the Bartlebyness of their respective writing careers. Unwritten books is a concept I’ve pondered on my own, but I never knew it had been explored this way before. 

It is actually an essay disguised as a novel, because it is almost entirely discussions of different writers and their non-writing. Vila-Matas so enthusiastically mythologizes his subjects that you almost end up admiring the non-writers more than the ones who actually put pen to paper. Some of the characters mentioned in the book are suspected to be inventions of Vila-Matas fertile imagination, but I guess it’s fair game given the theme of the book. I am taken in by this whole ruse of “writers of the No” and I’d recommend others to try these ideas on as well.

Summertime (J.M. Coetzee, 2009)

Coetzee is the kind of writer you like if you identify with his point of view. After reading Summertime I believe I do in some ways identify with his viewpoint, and therefore I must also say I like his writing. I might not be qualified to make such statements, though, as I have yet to read his fiction, but this volume of experimental memoir makes me eager to start. 

I was gifted the second volume of his autobiographical trilogy, Youth, when I was in my early twenties. I read it, liked it and largely forgot it. I remember seeing a copy of his Disgrace in the lunch room of my workplace around this time, but I wasn’t at the time tempted to give it a try. I knew Coetzee was a Nobel laureate, but somehow I had gotten the idea that his writing was difficult and cumbersome. Now, 13 years later, I tried my luck sampling the catalogue of Coetzee for the second time. Oddly enough, this time with yet another volume of autobiography: Summertime, the third volume of his autobiographical writings, from 2009. The book covers a period in Coetzee’s early thirties, a time when he moved back to South Africa from the US, in part to take care of his ailing and aging father. What sets this book apart from the earlier two volumes (Boyhood, 1997 and Youth, 2002) is that this is written with quite the innovative literary conceit. It is based on fictitious interviews with people who knew Coetzee during these years, as were they conducted by a biographer intending to write a book on the recently deceased author (that’s right, in this version of reality Coetzee has died, but in real reality it is he who is writing the book… rather nifty, eh?). Anyway, I was inspired to take up this short memoir when i learned of its composition. I have myself daydreamed about the very same literary exercise! 

The structure reminds me of Emanuel Bove‘s quiet masterpiece Mes amis (1924), with one chapter devoted to each friend. The writing is at times also reminiscent of the metafictive noodlings of Philip Roth‘s undeservedly forgotten gem Counterlife from 1986. 

The five interviews paint an unusual picture of an insecure man, a ridiculous man, full of strange ideas and self-doubt. It is interesting that Coetzee allows himself to be presented in such an unfavorable light, which sometimes reads as a somewhat disingenuous modesty. In reading the book (which only took a couple of hours in total) I identified more than once with the idiosyncrasies of the main character, his social ineptness, his inability to convey his viewpoint to his cousins, his silent manner. His intellectual ambitions also resemble those I once held – and possibly still retain. It shook me a bit to discover that I saw myself in Coetzee (or at least this version of Coetzee), and I wondered if I am the kind of reader who always overidentifies with the material? I know I often think that What I read most recently is somehow always the best thing I’ve ever read, but this time it was different. Maybe this can teach me something? I became curious about Coetzee’s real biography and when learning that he had been married twice and had grown children, i reassessed the image I got of him from the txt. He did probably exaggerate his social gracelessness, an impression that loses its punch a bit when his real life social standing is revealed. I mean, the person in the story could just as well have ended up a bum (as Emanuel Bove actually did).

I should mention something of Coetzee’s treatment of South Africa. All the talk of colonialism and the relations during apartheid was interesting stuff. I started imagining what it would be like if Sweden had had a colonial territory and how this would have affected the Swedish consciousness. I read Christian Kracht‘s Imperium, a book about German colonies in New Guinea last year, which also left an impression of colonialism on my mind. I think Swedish crime writer Niklas Nattochdag actually does mention the temporary Swedish colony St. Barthélémy in his 1794, but it’s not really comparable. 

Back to Coetzee – he has also written extensive collections of essays and his seems a very sharp mind indeed. I hope i will get to his fiction before another 13 years pass.