The Road to Babadag is a love letter to a certain part of eastern Europe. Stasiuk, a native Pole, has traveled through this his beloved part of the world, where people live still pastoral lives and are rarely bothered by tourists. These are the villages of Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova. He straddles the Carpathian mountains and visits the small towns, where he ingratiates himself with the local townsfolk over beer or plum liquor. He shuns the bigger cities, in fact he makes a point of avoiding any agglomeration with more than 10000 inhabitants. It is the small town culture he loves, the niceties of regular people, the local flavors. He admires the zigani, the farmers, the women, the children, all different folks that make up his ideal part of the world. He even writes about forays into Albania, Slovenia, etc. But his heart seems closest to the throughline of Hungary and Romania.
I enjoy reading about this part of the world, as my paternal grandparents were born at the foot of the Carpathian mountains. They were Jews – which is an element that is conspicuously missing from Stasiuk’s literary concoction. He writes page up and down about the mystique and allure of the Roma, but only mentions the word Jewish when he describes as old cemetery. Maybe he feels that Jews don’t belong in his idealized eastern Europe – even thought pre-holocaust they made up a sizable part of the population. Maybe he doesn’t think about them because nowadays there is not much trace of them having been there, besides the many synagogues transformed into auto repair shops.
I still loved reading about places I’ve heard my grandmother talk about, and I think Stasiuk is gifted in picking up interesting details. The style is quite meandering at times (especially in the last part, about the titular road to Babadag, which is a town on the Romanian Black Sea shore). Nothing really spectacular happens, but he conjures up the feeling of a place very well. It all seems to have been written in hindsight, pulled up from memory, half-remembered and half-imagined.
He writes about small nations, small peoples:
“Small countries should be exempt from history lessons. They should be floating around like islands a bit removed from the stream of history. At least that’s what I am thinking two days later on the motorway to Ljubljana.“
He makes a pilgrimage to the hometown of famed Romanian pessimist Emil Cioran, and quests to find the grave of 19th century Polish political leader Jakub Szela. He also makes space to do literary excursuses on the likes of Ion Caragiale and similar types.
Month: July 2021
Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Saul Bellow, 1970)
I can’t remember what compelled me to take my copy of Mr Sammler’s Planet from the shelf. Maybe I wanted to read something jewish? Did i wish to revisit the city i lives in as a kid? Most times these impulses are inspired by some thought, some associative thread. I had started this book some years ago, partly inspired to read it by hearing journalist Christopher Hitchens mention it in a talk.
This conundrum aside, I spent a few days reconnecting with the titular Mr Sammler. And boy, is he a grump. I understand more of Bellow’s writing mode, now (this being my third of books, fourth if counting nonfiction), and it seems most of his books are centered around a somewhat grumpy middle aged man. This particular one is written and set in a morally loose 1969, and a lot of the book is just Artur Sammler knocking everything about then-contemporary culture. A lot of those critiques still hold, 50 years later! The plot involves his kooky daughter stealing a manuscript about moon colonization and Sammler arranging for it to be returned. Another parallell story is his relative who is at death’s door.
I got a kick reading about going to New Rochelle, as i did just that when i was a kid, visiting relatives. Those relatives were Holocaust survivors, and in this book Bellow casts Mr. Sammler as one too. It has to be said that the Holocaust survivor portrayal is somewhat lacking, and not really convincing (this is also mntionen in Adam Kirsch’s review of the book from 2012). Also, as a European, Bellow’s idea of old European charm feels a little off.
It was interesting to read the book side by side with Martin mis’ Money, as they have a lot of similarities. Both Are critiques of contemporary culture (most of which more or less still stand), and both are mostly set in a morally decadent New York. On top of this, Bellow and Amis were friends! I managed to catch a BBC programme where amis travels to his idol Bellow and interviews him about his art. Elucidating.
Some of Bellow’s monologues are a bit long-winded though. It just seems like he wants to show off how clever he is, quoting people like John Milton or obscure poetry. This must be what they call a “novel of voice” rather than a novel of plot. But it’s an interesting voice to be around, for a while.
Money (Martin Amis, 1984)
A comedic romp of a novel, filled with fast-paced equivocations on the culture of excess that was the 80s (that’s at leasy what I’m told the eighties were, as I myself only managed to experience 1987-89 as a toddler). The story of an asanine director of TV commercials who flies from London to New York in the hopes of landing his first big movie deal. He takes the odd meetings with producers and film people, but mostly his mind races commenting on his binge drinking, his food addiction, and his interest in pornography.
Very funny writing, intermittently, with good one-liners from the sterling mind of Amis junior. A lot of it is satirical takes on the consumerist mentality that got going in the eighties – and, dishearteningly enough, a lot of his satire would be just as valid today (almost 40 years later!). This could be taken to mean that not much has changed since 1984 (which of course it has), but I think Amis’ adroit apercus were a bit ahead of their time, too. Some things strike today’s reader as frightfully dated, though, like the idea that the movie business is cool or the preponderance of strip clubs and prostitution.
Amis was inspired to write the novel after his experiences as a script writer for a movie with Kirk Douglas in 1980, a scifi picture called Saturn 3 (which was a phenomenal bomb of a movie, according to available box office statistics). He must also have been interested in exploring a certain kind of male ego, which is what the whole of the novel really is – the yammering thoughts of an insecure pompous twerp. Interestingly, a real person of that type would never be able to write so funnily about his own thoughts, so it is kind of an impossible combination that makes the formula work. Amis writes himself into the book, in order to fend off any criticism that the chauvinist ramblings of the protagonist are autobiographical. But Amis has admitted that some of the scenes in the book are based on his own experiences, even though he says that he mostly just “made it up”. From the first pages it put me in mind of some books I read in my late teens, like Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, or The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe. They are also in their own way, critiques of the culture of the eighties, even though they both came out towards the end of the decade. I liked the description of American culture from a British point of view, even though Amis technically made his character half-american (in the book he mentions his American mother who died when he was young, and he spent age 7 to 15 living with his aunt in New Jersey) – noone is fooled by this trick. A person who had spend those years in the US would not come up with the things the aptly named John Self says in Money… (I should know, I spent part of my childhood there too). Money rules everything, and bank notes are somehow suicide notes, says John Self. Not everything is clear in this book from 1984, but it is very funny at times.
Amis went on to write inventive books about Stalin, a dog, a concentration camp commendant, scifi imaginings of London in the year 1999 (written in 1989) and a state of the union satire of the UK called “Lionel Asbo”.
Kinship of all Species 