The Making of a Therapist (Louis Cozolino, 2004)

review to come

Mon Amerique commence en Pologne (Leslie Kaplan, 2009)

I was very much drawn to this book, strangely enough solely because of the title alone. I could instantly sympathize with the idea contained within those five words, probably since I too have spent time in three countries (two of them being France and “Amerique”). Poland is not a direct connection, but one set of my grandparents were born just southeast of Poland…

Leslie Kaplan has a trajectory which is somewhat unusual in that her forebears came from Poland, went to America, and then emigrated back across the Atlantic to France, with American confidence and a sense of world-citizenry. Little Leslie was born in the states but grew up in France with a double consciousness, or maybe even triple if one counts the Polish-Jewish roots.

I learn that this is the sixth part of a series of autobiographical writings, and become curious as to what she might have written about in the previous five, because this feels pretty condensed and definitive. It has three parts, childhood, youth and adulthood. These are set in the 50s, 60’s-70’s and 80’s, respectively. The first part meditates on her flailing American identity and how it clashes with her French upbringing. It also tells the story of her parents, who seem to have been career-driven universalists who worked in diplomacy and international relations. Kaplan herself was drawn to the political stirrings that culminated in May ’68 and the second part is rife with stories of that period. She quotes Bob Dylan lyrics, retells her memories of almost all of Jean-Luc Godard films, and other movies of the era. The third part retells the story of a friendship with someone, and feels different, colder and more austere than the previous parts. The 1980s represented a break with the earlier period. I might not seek out more Leslie Kaplan, as it feels like I have got a sense of her style from this book. Maybe later on.

Til: En litterär reise (Tor Eystein Øverås, 2006)

A Norwegian writer travels in a circle from Norway to Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Denmark and then back to Norway. He also visits Sweden. It is a sort of tour of the Baltic kulturgemeinschaft. Eystein writes in the introduction that he wants to transcend national borders, and ends up with something of a Nordic version of the magisterial “Danube” by Claudio Magris. I read it in the original Norwegian, all 500+ pages. There is also an English translation, heavily redacted (half the book was cut out). It was given a new title too: “Baltic” – which is very poor. Granted, “Til” is also a shitty name, but at least somewhat mysterious.

Given its length and meandering style, I had to read this in 50 page spurts. I had to skip and skim a bit. It was fun to read in Norwegian, I like expanding my vocabulary and learning new words. Eystein goes all in on musing about Nordic history, literature, architecture, art and more. He isn’t afraid to throw in a movie reference or two, with mostly 80s and 90s art films, which kind of dates the text for a contemporary reader. The dated feeling is partly because of what movies he references (the Danish film Babette’s Feast (1987) is mentioned, I believe) and partly also the simple fact that they are movie references at all. But that was the world back then. Eystein was born in 1968.

He intersperses his text with memories of earlier visits. He mentions the places he stays at,which are often writer’s retreats and cultural centers. He complains about the coffee or retells some small talk he makes. Not that interesting. Some of the observations seem quaint and naive to me, and I don’t know if it is because times have changed since 2002 (when this trip was undertaken) or because Eystein actually was/is a bit quaint? Like his discussion of österbotten and västerbotten or the fact that he is fascinated that medieval churches made candles out of beeswax.

Don’t get me wrong – I love the idea that someone undertook a projcet like this, in the part of the world that I call home. I once made a similar (but shorter) coastal trip from Oslo to Stockholm, traveling the entire coast of Sweden between those points. But I didn’t write about it. I’d really like to make a similar trip to the one Eystein made for this book, but I don’t have access to the kind of grants Eystein got. While reading, I feel like he could have come up with stronger material than this, but then I remember that he didn’t grow up with the Internet. And he grew up in a small town called Bodø.

He reflects upon why he always chooses the canonized literature to connect with a country…and he has a convoluted argument about why certain countries develop poetry and some countries write epics. For some reason does he find the island of Gotland similar to Rome. He mentions latitudes and the fact that our geography doesn’t have to be so closed as it is by borders. Stockholm is on the same latitudinal coordinates as Oslo, which is on basically the same as Helsinki, as is Saint Petersburg. He asks: does the snow on the Norwegian side of the border become Finnish snow when it crosses the border?

As he circles the Ostsee he also encounters non-Nordic lands. Like the little strip of Russia, the former Soviet states south of Finland (which in Scandinavian languages is what we think of when the word baltic comes up) – as well as Poland and Germany. He discusses the Hanseatic league… the trade of amber (bernstein). The Vikings. Kind of good to read this from a Norwegian, cause a Swedes would probably have been too blind to a lot of things.

He writes about his own doubts about this “project” and revisits those thoughts maybe too many times. “I sit at the coffee shop and think about the point of this journey” is a sentence that is recurrent, in various forms. He also thinks back on his youth and his tendency to be non-participating and taking the role of observer.

He returns to how all literature is based in space and time – a thought that must have seemed more novel in 2002 than today. The idea of situating literary studies in historical and spatial context is part of the standard nowadays. Franco Morretti’s literary geographies come to mind.

Norway is not part of the Baltic countries. But he is the one who does this trip. Maybe it took a Norwegian to write a literary travelogue of the “Eastern sea”, as this body of water is called in the Scandinavian languages. Or maybe it took a Norwegian grant committee? I suspect this is what he means when he writes that Norway is the best country to be a writer in.

Revisiting this 20 years after the trip was undertaken begs the question of what has changed in the two decades that have passed? References to the USSR feel quaint. And references to world war 2 seem ancient nowadays. What would a “Til 2.0” be like?

The Road to Babadag (Andrzej Stasiuk, 2002)

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.

You Must Change Your Life (Peter Sloterdijk, 2009)

“Peter Sloterdijk ist plötzlich erkrankt…”

Once, when I was in Hamburg, I was set to hear a talk by Peter Sloterdijk at the Literaturhaus (by the Alster). This was a few years ago, so it must have been around the time he published Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit. Unfortunately, upon arrival I was met by a notice that the evening had been cancelled.

I consider this reading a late compensation for this lost evening. And what a reading! Full of crazy ideas, new angles, strange juxtapositions. In fact, there is another autobiographical hook story to this book, poetry-related. It has to do with the title of the book, lifted from a poem by Rilke. Ever since I heard that poem in an American movie in my teens, it has stuck in my personal inventory of meaningful ephemera. I took it to mean those moments in life when one realises that life needs to change. I understand now that my interpretation seems to differ from Rilke’s original intent.

It was, serendipitously, one of those moments that led me back to this book (which sparked my interest upon publication, but got lost in the stream, as most things do).

The theme of the book is quite monumental: the history of what Sloterdijk terms anthropotechnics. That is, human efforts to change life. I’m not sure it is an entirely felicitous coinage, but it has a certain cachet.

Divided into four parts, with essaylike chapters on various aspects of these “human techniques” the first part treats Kafka, Unthan, Rilke, Baron de Coubertin and L. Ron Hubbard. The second part goes into Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. It goes into a lot of how religious practices changes human practices – and likens asceticism to the advent of literacy. Just as humanity made a “leap of literacy”, it made a “leap of asceticism”. Part three is about world-relinquishment, and reminds me of Ahmad Sadri on Weber‘s typology of intellectuals and Harry T. Hunt on western mysticism. Part four is dedicated (in a rambling style) to education and how it connects to anthropotechnics, based on Czech “father of pedagogy” Jan Comenius.

This, my first real encounter with a Sloterdijk text, is an exposure to his style and thinking. It feels liberating to read his subtle smashing of contemporary cultural idols, even though his writing style is quite abstruse and rambling.

I tried boiling down my thoughts and impressions of this book, and my notes are very scattered and multiform. Amorphous? This is, at least in part, because the book is so heterogeneous with unending new topics introduced. It is hard to pin it all into the overall theme of human techniques (which is a very wide theme, by the way). Anyway, I will list a few standout thoughts, in fashionable bullet points:

* The metaphor of the mountain. This is an old, old analogy, but somehow Sloterdijk breathes new air into it. He speaks of life as climbing a mountain, and most people stay at the base camp.

* Metanoetics. This word appears almost every other page. I always took noesis to mean thinking (after a half-hearted appropriation of the vernadskian/chardinian term nöosphere) and took metanoetics to mean thinking of thinking. But, it seems this particular phrase originates with Japanese philosopher Hajime Tanabe.

* The text contains extended discussions of certain undisputed assumptions of current social theory, like the concept of habitus (Bourdieu) and a exegesis on Foucault and his work on “le souci de soi”. Also long-ranging connections between demography, statecraft and religion and how they influenced ideas in social thought.

* There is an exposé of how the “holy” or magical or saintly transforms into the secular categories like artists, geniuses, virtuosos and wunderkinder during the renaissance.

* Towards the end of the book, a long discussion on education based on educational philosopher Comenius, and the pithy quote “all education is conversion” (supposedly from Pierre Hadot).

In closing, a few quotes:

““Man” comes about from the small minority of ascetic extremists who step out from the crowd and claim that they are actually everyone.”

“The modern effect known as “religion” perhaps ensues only when an ethical practice programme is turned to the purpose of collective identity formation.”

“It was only with Luther’s reformation that the Orient was driven out of newer Christianity.”

“Petrarch was the first modern to wear a poet’s crown (april 6, 1341)”

“…from that point on, being human means running oneself as a workshop of self-realization”

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.

The Vegetarian (Han Kang, 2007)

A brutal read. Interesting to read a book with such an unusual manner of expression. That is probably partly due to the fact that it is written i Korean, but I assume that this book would strike regular Koreans as unusual as well. I like the conceit of letting each part of the book be narrated by a different character. There is a Canadian book about a marriage that is made with the same concept, only it is comprised of only two sides. It is about the two perspectives of a failing marriage, that of the man and that of the woman. If I recall correctly, I think it was also read from each sides of the codex, so that the woman’s version is read from one side and the man’s from the other side. But don’t let this slight digression dissuade you from continuing to take in my well-crafted review. I would sa that this book is not suitable for reading aloud. It is quite extreme in the opening chapter with the description of the wife as “ordinary” and “ugly” and so on. The premise of the book is that the wife decides not to eat meat, a kind of “grand refus” or Bartlebyeian protest. Her immedaite surroundings react to this decision with disdain. Later on in the book, it is revealed that she wants to become a tree, which is her idea of the ultimate form of existance. The whole story of wanting to become a tree is strongly reminiscent of the book Solange by finnish raconteur Willy Kyrklund. But, it seems upon closer reflection that mrs. Kang in this choice of story is inspired by Korean poet Yi Sang (1910-1937), rather than Kyrklund.

I wish also to point out that Kang succeeds in portraying the peculiar tensions of a psych ward, and also with the description of the main character’s mental instability. I stil don’t understand what a Mongolian mark is, though.

Ancestral Tables (Dilsa Demirbag-Sten, 2005)

Stamtavlor (Dilsa Demirbag-Sten, 2005)

This Swedish book by a Kurdish-Swedish journalist about growing up in Kurdistan and Sweden is filled with stories about her family and relatives, and Kurdish culture. Written when she herself became a mother and started thinking about her own cultural heritage and what she wanted to transmit to her children.

A big part of the book is filled with proud disdain for a lot of the misogynist and patriarchal practices in Kurdish folk tradition. It is quite obvious that Demirbag-Sten is no fan of religion, and she describes her family’s missteps and the dire consequences that the Kurdish “honor culture” can have.

The tone reminded me of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other overeager pro-secularist writers. I sympathise with the secularist cause when I read these tales of backwards traditions and blind rage, but I am also wary of those who are too hardline about the secular perspective. It’s certainly a balancing act on a razor’s edge to try to reconcile both views.

The book sent my thinking to the Kurdish people and how their history compares to my own closest ethnic filiation, the Jewish people. For instance, the parts when she and her Swedish husband and small children visited military zones in Kurdistan reminded me of how other Swedes have reacted to military presence in cities like Tel Aviv. Demirbag-Sten portrays Kurds as not being a literate people, and that no written sources remain to tell about their origins.

Many of the stories are real gutwrenchers – heartbreaking stories about torture, deceit and love. It made me think of Svetlana Alexievich’s writings, who is quite expert at picking out and describing suffering. The difference when reading these stories compared to Alexievich is that they come closer to my reality since they have been lived by someone raised in Sweden, and someone I’ve heard speak at various conferences, to boot.

It was a timely read for me, as I too will soon have to think about the same issues of transmitting cultural heritage. It’s quite the conundrum.

(This review is based on the Swedish language version of the book, as it has not been translated to English)