These eleven stories from Polish writer Hanna Krall are quite haunting portraits of lives in the shadow of Nazi atrocities. Hanna Krall writes in a very particular style, an extremely dense prose. Famed critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki once quipped that the famously terse prose of Hemingway is like a chatterbox when compared to that of Krall.
Standout stories of this collection is one about a adult woman recalling her second mother and real mother, who arranged for her to be hidden with a non-Jewish woman (a fate that also befell Krall herself during the war). This woman then pretended it was her own child, and the story very powerfully explores the subsequent feelings of loss and grief from both mother and daughter. Another story is about a man who survived the death camp of Sobibor, and his return to those grounds after having lived in America for a long time. I could actually recognize who the story is about without it being mentioned, because I had seen a documentary film about the very same man not too long ago. Toivo Blatt, in the film by Peter Nestler, returns to Poland to see the area again. Krall does a very good job of conveying his personality in words. A notable story towards the end is about God telling a writer that writing is only a joke. It is a collection of about 250 pages, but I read it concomitantly with three other Krall publications, totaling a whooping 700 pages (but that’s nothing compared to a collected volume published in Poland 2017 called Fantom bólu: 1224 pages). Phantom pain is also the name of a story in this collection, about a conspiracy among Nazi officers to assassinate Hitler, that unfortunately failed. She located those involved in the plot and spun her story from interviews and research. I get the feeling that all her stories are based on real cases, and then embellished and edited to the form of short stories. It is a very transporting style of writing. A lot of the themes revolve around grief and loss, and several stories involve adoption and wartime estrangement between children and parents. The stories are filled with little observations and details that really add to the bigger picture. I was enamoured of Krall’s writing so much that I read four of her books back to back, a fact that I hope speaks to Krall’s literary merit. I read them in Swedish translation, and I have noticed that her publication in English differs a bit. The collection The Woman from Hamburg (2005) contains some stories from this volume from 1993 and the rest from Krall’s Dowody na istnienie (“Proof of existence”) from 1996.
Month: October 2020
Voyage au bout de la nuit (Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1934)
Céline is one of those difficult writers. He is indisputably an innovator of French literature, with his writing style, the ellipses, the generous use of argot, and the dark misanthropic tone. The misanthropic tone is probably somehow connected to the antisemitism he expressed in his later writings.
The book is a classic of 20th century literature, and I regret not having come to it earlier. It is the story of a young medical student, Ferdinand Bardamu (carefully calqued from Céline’s own experiences as a med student) who decides to enlist in the army for the great war. He later deserts, as he is rather cowardly than dead. He instead goes to Africa and spends time in the colony of Fort-Gono. After a disappointing séjour he leaves for Detroit, where he works in a car plant making Ford model T’s. The last part of the book sees him return to France and practice medicine among the poor in the French town of Drancy. As such it is a reckoning with large topics like war, colonialism, capitalism, poverty.
I like the division of the book in travels to various places and their respective themes. The book itself has no chapters or real orientation points otherwise, it is all 500 pages of continuous text, which can be nauseating at times. Much has been said about Céline’s importing of street language to literature, and his uneasy connection to antisemitism is also fairly well-treaded ground. He remains a controversial figure, but leading French intellectuals like Alain Finkielkraut and Stéphane Zagdanski are fans of his work nonetheless. There is a youtube channel called “le petit Célinien” with endless materials on Céline and there seems to be a lot of things to say about this singular writer. I will end with a few quotes from the novel, that might give a flavour of the tone of the prose:
“The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”
“An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That’s the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It’s dream time. ”
“There is something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don’t give a damn whether they’re getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don’t ever try to understand what we’re here for. They just don’t care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they’re bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.
“That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.”
A Monkey in Winter (Antoine Blondin, 1959)
A Monkey in Winter is a novel about coping with life. The story is this: a man checks in to an off-season guesthouse on the French north coast. It is run by a sexagenarian ex-alcoholic and his wife. The young man is in a sort of crisis about his daughter, who attends a boarding school in the town. He comes to the hotel and immediately starts searching for alcohol. It is not long before he pleads to the innkeeper to share a glass with him, an offer that he ultimately cannot refuse.
Reading this book in its original French represents for me an attempt to resuscitate the French language skills I once had. In a way it is sort of existential: my knowledge of French has enabled me access to an otherwise closed world. The book itself is also existential, in a sense (although the author would have disliked that description): central to the book is an anecdote about monkeys hibernating during winter, a motif that seems an apt description of both protagonists. It also got me to thinking about alcohol use, which is another grand theme of the book. Major literary depictions of alcohol abuse include Venedikt Erofeev‘s Moscow Station, Charles R. Jackson‘s the Lost Weekend, Joseph Roth‘s La leggenda del santo bevitore and unforgettably, Malcolm Lowry‘s Under the Volcano.
The writer, Antoine Blondin was recommended me by my former English teacher (who is a wonderful man, a French-speaking Tunisian who emigrated to Sweden in the late 50s). He praised Blondin’s prose as being particularly pretty, but – hélas! – only appreciable to those with sufficient understanding of the language. Ever since my teacher mentioned the name Blondin in passing have I wanted to dig my proverbial teeth in his writing. Now having done just that, even with my limited but serviceable grasp of French, I can see what he means. This is the writing style of a language equilibrist. I am impressed by his diction and composition. A lot of it goes over my head, no doubt. I’m not sure this book is the best choice for a first try, but it seems to be Blondin’s most well-known work, and it was even turned into a motion picture with Jean Gabin and Jean-Paul Belmondo in 1962.
Reading about the author I came across the expression “anar de droite” which seems to be an appellation in French culture for a type of right-wing anarchist, which Antoine Blondin sometimes is associated with. This book didn’t strike me as being right-wing, or as anarchist either, for that matter. Maybe the standards for these things are different in the French-speaking world?
Giovanni’s Room (James Baldwin, 1956)
This post is my contribution to the #1956Club, amiably hosted by StuckinaBook and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, wherein book bloggers are invited to read and review books that were published in 1956.
James Baldwin has enjoyed a certain renaissance these last couple of years. First, with a string of fêted documentary films, foremost of which Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck‘s I am not your Negro, based on Baldwin’s unpublished manuscript. Shortly thereafter, Academy award winning director Barry Jenkins made If Beale Street Could Talk, based on Baldwin’s 1974 novel. Something about James Baldwin speaks to our present moment, even though more than 30 years have passed since his untimely death. A possible explanation is that the issues that animated his struggle have since come into sharp view for mainstream society, with movements like BLM and those championing LGBT rights. I have seen the odd archival footage of Baldwin in full “public intellectual” mode, and was impressed by his presence – but until now, I’ve never read any of his work.
Giovanni’s Room is Baldwin’s second novel, after the debut Go Tell it on the Mountain, which is a kind of bildungsroman, touching a lot upon the theme of race issues. Giovanni’s Room addresses another key theme of Baldwin’s, namely that of male to male relationships. It is the story of David, a blonde, white American twentysomething living in Paris. He has a girlfriend, but is at the same time nurturing a curiosity about other men. He meets Giovanni, an Italian who tends bar in a gay nightclub, and the two engage in a relationship. He is invited to Giovanni’s Room, which, in addition to being the bartender’s place of residence, is a sort of metaphor for homosexual love.
The novel was important for bringing up gay themes, and furthered public understanding of the realities of gay life. I realised mid-through the book that I’ve read very few books with gay themes. The few writers that come to mind are André Gide, Jonas Gardell and S. R. Delany (whose singular Times Square Red is actually quite extraordinary). This theme has simply never been a topic I’ve been particularly inclined to explore. Unexpected discoveries come up when reading a book you don’t planned on reading – as was the case for me with Giovanni’s Room.
I am struck by how this book communicates the moral imagination of the 1950’s, and how distant it feels from that of today. Certain topics and their treatment hurtle towards obsolescence with surprising rapidity. Nevertheless, it is interesting to revisit them to be reminded of this process. Another theme present is the book is that of the American in exile i Paris, which I would imagine strikes more than a few readers as a particularly hackneyed theme. I counted off the top of my head some other contributions to the genre, and came up with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Anatole Broyard, Enrique Vila-Matas (not American though) and Adam Gopnik. Baldwin spent several years in Paris in the 50’s and bases this book on those experiences. The love affair between David and Giovanni is purportedly inspired by Baldwin’s real life dalliance with a Swiss man called Lucien Happersberger.
All in all, in my estimation a book that is interesting as a sort of historical testimony. I am happy I picked up Baldwin’s book, and hope to read his essays and criticism in the future.
Kinship of all Species 