Les bagages de sable (Anna Langfus, 1962)

Anna Langfus is a forgotten writer; to the extent that she’s remembered at all, it’s as the recipient of the Goncourt prize of 1962, for Les Bagages de sable. She was a refugee from the second world war, who grew up in a Jewish family in Lublin, Poland. She survived by adopting the identity of a non-Jewish friend, Maria. After war’s end, she felt unsafe during the anti-Jewish public sentiment in Poland and made up her mind to leave for France. There she started writing plays and managed to publish three books, somewhat based on her own experiences, 1960, 1962 and 1965. Bagages de sable is the second one of these books. The title means luggage of sand, which strikes me as a good image. When it was translated to English in 1965, it got the title “The Lost Shore”.

It is about a young woman displaced from another country, to France. She meets an older man with whom she enters an affair. It is never mentioned what country she is from, or what she has lived through, but there is a palpable sense of a wound or a trauma in her past. In this way, I believe it is quite an innovative book, where she touches upon themes later explored by the likes of Georges Perec, and China Miéville in This Census-taker.

I have a pet theory where female holocaust survivors who wrote about their experiences often wrote three books, and that this was a kind of exorcising of their trauma. The first book about their childhood, the second of their time in the camps and the third about their life afterwards. I don’t think Langfus really fits that mould, but she was one of the earliest survivors to write about their experiences. Along with Piotr Rawicz (also originally from Poland) and Elie Wiesel (who wrote in Yiddish) she was among the first survivors to deal with their survivorship in literary form in France, and among the first of any country, really.

She is not entirely forgotten, however. The fact that she was awarded the Goncourt Prize (France’s highest literary honor) helps to slow her descent into obscurity. There are also memorial plaques in France and in Poland, as well as a community library bearing her name, in Sarcelles, Paris. Recent years has also seen a Facebook group created to commemorate her work. If she hadn’t died suddenly in 1966 maybe she had been able to write more books. She was in the process of writing a book while she died, according to her biographer Jean-Yves Potel, who wrote “Les disparations d’Anna Langfus” in 2014, a book which sparked renewed interest in Langfus and her writing.

_______

This is the second time I write about a holocaust survivor in the Year club. I previously wrote about Herman Sachnowitz in 2021.

Racée (Rachel Khan, 2021)

Racé is the word Khan invents to counteract racisé and racialisé. The English word for the latter is racialized, which came into common parlance in America about 15-20 years ago. But Khan is not American, she’s French, and she has her own ideas on how to tackle questions of race. She want to push back on the idea that we as humans should compartmentalize in identity groups based on artificial categories like black and white. She is not black or white, she is a lot of things, she means to say, and doesn’t want to be reduced to a one-dimensional category.

She shares this idea with American thinkers like Thomas Chatterton Williams and Coleman Hughes. They are of so-called mixed origin and maybe this fact gives them a particular viewpoint on these kinds of matters. Khan questions the value of seeing identity in terms of mixité, and asks rhetorically, what is a mixed marriage and what is a mixed person?

The word racialisé, Khan informs us, is from Feminist sociologist Colette Guillamin, elaborated on in a book from 1973. But in America the use of this word seems to have been pioneered by theorists Omi & Winant during the 80s.

Throughout the book she returns to quotations of fellow French writer Romain Gary, and to a lesser extent Edouard Glissant. A Romain Gary quote: On est tous des additionés, we’re all “additioned”, a sentiment Khan must sympathize with. 

Rachel Khan criticizes the notion of safe spaces, rooms or meetings exclusively for people of a certain origin. The very idea makes her uncomfortable, and she offers that her safe space is a room of different people, ”Mon safe space est un space des melanges”. The text is incidentally rife with wordplay: “les maux d’un climat déréglé et les mots d’un climat délétère”, or ”c’est un trou noir, c’est troublant”. 

This book is full of ideas that leaves the reader with questions and after reading only a handful of them seem settled. The fact that its ideas live on unresolved in the reader makes it hard to write a definite review. I’m undecided on what I think about some of these issues and I still ponder the notion of mixedness, and how Khan’s mixed origins must have influenced her thinking. 

She discusses words she dislikes (quota, afro-descendant, racisé, souchien), words she likes (intimacy, silence, creolization) and words she finds non-helpful (mixité, diversity, ”vivre ensemble”). Her book speaks to the experience of being mixed but its goal is to counteract the idea of race categories and therefore also of the notion of “mixed race”. Or maybe the goal is to offer an alternative narrative? She constantly feels to be inbetween:

J’étais juive chez les Noires, noire chez les Juifs, juriste chez les artistes, artiste chez les politiques… Maintenant, je suis à chaque fois quelque chose « de service » : « la comédienne de service » chez les intellectuels ou « l’intello de service » chez les sportifs.

I was Jewish among the blacks, Black among the jews, lawyer among the artists, artist among the politicians… Now, I’m at every instant something “of service”: comedian of service among the intellectuals or intellectual of service among the athletes.

This sense of being caught between worlds is increasingly common as the world continues to move around. The notion of race, whiteness, blackness, otherness is in transition. I’m happy that there are other voices than those who one-sidedly advocate a separatistic identity show. But sometimes, in her eagerness to think universalistically, Khan forgets that some things really are particular. And maybe just as some people have a hard time understanding her perspective as someone from mixed origins (and yes, in a sense, everyone is mixed) she might have a hard time understanding those who are nor perceived as mixed. 

She writes that she could only have come into being in France, where the values of equality and democracy led her parents into communion from entirely different worlds. A world where an eastern European Jew whose parents survived the Holocaust could build a family with an Animist Muslim Senegambian man. She means that she has the values of France inscribed in her veins because in her view they were the basis for their coupling in the first place. This book contains a lot of high-minded thinking, and I’m sure some of it is very noble. I’m just not sure the world is ready for it. Maybe she is a pioneer and it might just be that her thinking will become widespread in the coming years.

La voix du terroriste (Claude Kayat, 2023)

This book by fascinating writer Claude Kayat can be seen as a meditation on the current state of identity and the shifting kinship and enmity between different faith groups. The setup is shockingly direct; during a deadly terrorist attack and hostage situation in a Paris synagogue, the terrorists inexplicably let one of their key hostages go, without any explanation. The newly released captive, Ludovic Lévy, is deeply relieved, but dumbfounded as to why he was set free. And didn’t he recognize something familiar in the voice of one of the captors?

After some investigation, he believes that the terrorists were his childhood friends Abdallah and Mourad, since estranged. Lévy wants to understand why they became terrorists, and the terrorists, naturally, want to avoid identification. A sort of detective story ensues, where they negotiate their respective positions with reference to faith, history, family and power. We get to follow both parties in interspersed chapters, adding to the suspense of the narrative. An interesting subplot is that one of the terrorists is a “grand blond” who has a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father, whose aberrant appearance is part of how they can be identified.

It is a story of how we are all human, and that we should be able to live together. Themes from Kayat’s earlier novel la Paria can be discerned, which also deals with the sometimes taut relations between Jews and Arabs – but this time in Paris instead of the Galilee. As with la Paria, the intertwined stories and fates of the characters must be reminiscent of pre-colonial Tunisia were Jews and Muslims lived closer to one another. One can sense that Kayat hearkens back to those days and wants to recall that it is possible to achieve again. Only a writer like Kayat, who is familiar with both of these milieux would be able to write a story like this, and he does it with aplomb. Sometimes it veers into implausible territory (the final journey of Mourad to Stockholm), but then one has to be reminded that it is meant as a parable. La voix du terroriste is a short novel, but it packs a big punch throughout 143 pages, and its message is loud and clear. The absence of a final resolve is surely meant to mirror real life, as if to remind the reader that it is up to us (you and me and everyone else) to change things.

Review of La Voix du terroriste in English by Christophe Prémat
review in French by Albert Bensoussan
My review of Claude Kayat’s La Paria (2019)

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.

L’après littérature (Alain Finkielkraut, 2021)

Alain Finkielkraut once spent an afternoon with my grandmother. Or so she claims. It’s supposed to have been during one of his speaking appointments in Stockholm in the 90s, but who knows if it really happened…

He is a leading voice of the kind of high culture that still exists in Paris. He holds seat 21 in the Académie française and also has his own radio programme, “Répliques”, where he discusses ideas every Saturday. He isn’t afraid to speak out against what he thinks are the lunacies of contemporary culture. This, his most recent book of essays, consists very much of diatribes against current culture. It’s an interesting ride.

He visits covid, the MeToo movement, Black Lives Matters, environmental activism and various aspects of free speech. He laments the loss of high culture. He talks about the primacy of Christian values to Western civilization at one point, and then goes on to wave the flag of laicité the next. That doesn’t necessarily imply a contradiction.

One of his threads is the idea that we are living in the end times when it comes to literary culture. The age of spectacle has firmly taken hold, they story goes, and we are now (why only now and not before?) in the era of “after literature”, as the title indicates. This is something that has been said on and off since the turn of the second-to-last century, and maybe most notably by situationist Guy Débord in his “Society of the Spectacle” from 1967. Finkielkraut seems to mean that this time, it’s for real.

I’m all for cultural pessimism if it’s well articulated. It gives food for thought, not least since it forces you to work through the arguments and find holes. Finkielkraut is dedicated to the tenor of pessimism, and maybe he has good reason for it: he is not safe in France today. He was accosted in the street not long ago, treated with ethnic slurs by passersby. He has also been dropped from a few of his speaking engagements as a result of his outspoken ways.

Throughout the essays are lots of references to the writings of Philip Roth (his name is mentioned 57 times throughout the book’s 120 pages), and Finkielkraut also has a soft spot for Kundera quotes. He’s that kind of person. He was born in 1949 as the child of Holocaust survivors. Kind of like my father was, only in another part of the world.

The seven chapters can be summarized capsually like this:
1) céline won over proust, 2) #metoo attracts terrible simplificatrixes, 3) contemporary culture is for sleepwalkers, 4) there has been an overthrow of the old world 5) beauty is no longer revered in our culture, 6) the loss of the tragic is indeed tragic and 7) various pieces of kunderiana.

Le Grand Meaulnes (Alain-Fournier, 1913)

This one is well-known in France but not so much elsewhere. In England, perhaps. It’s about a teenager who moves to a new town and then finds a magical garden in which he falls in love and then tries to find that garden and the girl he fell in love with again. Sounds formulaic? Maybe it is. But it is also a nice novel about youth and love and their inevitable complications (partly inspired by the author’s own life). It is written just before the first great war, so it stands as one of the last novels of the pre-ww1 era, and its sensibilities reflect that time period. Part romantic and part modernist it is a mixture of influences. It is also a late example of the rural novel, as it is set in the rural area of Cher in the middle of the French hexagon, where Alain-Fournier himself grew up. The romanticizing of childhood made me think of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which was written around the same time.
The titular character Augustin Meaulnes is the main protagonist but the story is narrated by the younger Francois. This is a modernist angle. The title le Grand Meaulnes is said to have inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to write his Great Gatsby. The book accumulated more mystique as its author saw his demise shortly after the book was published, as he was deployed and killed while serving as lieutenant in the French army in September 1914.

Berezina (Sylvain Tesson, 2015)

A wild-eyed Frenchman comes up with the idea of traveling from Moscow to Paris, retracing the steps of the Napoleonic army as they retreat from the failed invasion of Russia in 1812 – 200 years later to the day, on a motorbike with a sidecar.

This is exactly the kind of idea that appeals to me, although I’m not sure why that is. I guess I have an adventurous streak that is fed somewhat by imbibing travel writing of trips done by others. I also like it when there are references to history mixed with current development – which is exactly what Tesson does in this short book. It retells the 13 days it took him and his friends to traverse a big stretch of continental Europe in old Soviet-era motorcycles (called Urals..).

Tesson, ever the adventurer, had ten years prior to this trip undertaken a ride on horseback from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan, and on foot from Yakutsk to Calcutta, so he is well acquianted with Russian and Russian-adjacent milieux. He is accompanied by Cédric, Thomas and two Russian guys, Vassily and Vitaly. There are some monuments for the fallen French along the way, but not much. The names of the towns they passed reminded me of the ravages of King Charles XII in the roughly the same area about a century before Napoleon. There is yet another connection between the two kings, or at least their countries, as strange coincidence had it that Napoleon’s brother-in-law became the king of Sweden in the early 19th century. The original wish of the Swedish ruling class was that Napoleon’s own brother would be sworn in, but he was deemed unfit. By the perspicacious efforts of a single Swedish nobleman, who nominated one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte – who in the Swedish succession became king Charles XIV John. This idea was of course a move to geopolitically safeguard Sweden from invasion, and to proffer allegiance to the mighty Napoleon. Funnily enough, his great-grandchildren are at the top of Swedish nobility to this day, and Jean-Baptiste’s great-great-grandson has held the title of King of Sweden for nearly fifty years.

Digressions to questions of royal lineage in the Nordics aside, this little adventure was a fun read. Tesson muses on Russian customs, memorial culture, European road infrastructure. One of his companions is a geologist and mentions a theory of black soil that is interesting.

What if someone would do a similar journey following in the footsteps of the Carolingian army? It would probably be accused of being xenophobic, somehow. Or maybe it has already been done, in a way, by historian Peter Englund, I don’t know.

Fragments of an Infinite Memory (Maël Renouard, 2016, transl. 2021)

Recent years has seen the advent of a particular book, that we might call “the tech memoir”. These range from being somewhat alarmist (How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell), nerdy (Bitwise by David Auerbach) and critical of corporations (Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner). Mael Renouard contributed to the genre in 2016 in French, an effort that last year was translated into English. 

What separates Renouard from most other tech memoirs is that he comes to these issues from a more literary viewpoint, as he spends his days translating and writing novels (as well as teaching philosophy). I enjoyed his circuitous reminiscences of the intersections of his literary life and his internet use.

Reading the book made me realise that the web has (incredibly enough) been part of mainstream life for going on 25 years now and it’s no longer just computer world insiders who write about it anymore. The literary sensibility that Renouard uses gives rehashed arguments a new spin. Like this little aphorism:

”Who hasn’t gone on the internet looking for past loves and friends not seen for years? Time lost in search of lost time.”

He also is no stranger to coining neologisms, like “Googlemancy”, a kind of supernatural divination with the aid of the today ubiquitous Internet search engine Google. He notices how his Internet use changes his relationship to memory, and how he discovers in himself a new “impulse to share” which he didn’t have before the advent of the share button.

The Internet and its accompanying technologies (cellphones, laptop computers) have changed the playing field for literature, argues Renouard. He notes that a writer like Patrick Modiano “has become impossible since the coming of the the Internet”. Technological change also affects our relationship to images, text messages, paper books, scrolls, libraries. Renouard experiences new situations like hard drive failures (“as I am writing this book my computer broke down”) and how they play into the literary process.

The essays are peppered with lots of references to philosophy (a selection: Derrida Deleuze Bergson Hegel Badiou Malebranche Leibniz Debord Duns Scotus Nietzsche) as well as a fair share of Greek mythology. Particularly notable is a chapter of inspired imaginary meetings of figures from antiquity which conjured up possible internet logs of Augustus Caesar and others (it sounds hokey, but it is well written). A related ploy is the recurring “psychopathology of digital life”, a play on Freud‘s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Other thinkers he plays with are Ray Kurzweil, Chateaubriand and Proust. Just try this little madeleine on for size:

The recollection machine has strange effects. I don’t know why each time I listen to excerpts from Einstein on the Beach on YouTube, and in particular “Knee Play No. 2,” I remember an evening I spent with my father at the Comédie Française in November 1996—I had never heard Philip Glass and Bob Wilson’s opera until I saw it staged in Paris in January 2014. Similarly, I ask myself why it is that whenever I listen to the instrumental version of “Last Dance in Copacabana” by Superfunk, I am beset by images of my first trip to Greece, in 2000—maybe I heard it in a bar at the time without paying it any attention, or maybe it was part of the distant sounds echoing from the island’s only nightclub, now shut down. But I do know that I can retrieve voluntarily, with infallible efficacy, these involuntary associations that have the strength and charm of Proustian recollections.

page 23

Renouard gets into a lot of stuff in this book, and I’ve only mentioned a few of them. Most of it is in the interesting category of things you’ve experienced yourself, but haven’t yet really recognized the noteworthiness of. An example of this is his excursus on the phenomenon of autocorrect when texting. Pretty brilliant.

Summing up, I’ll leave you with my favorite passage of the book. This is where Renouard describes meeting an old man who has become addicted to the attention of Internet platforms. He had previously spent ten years “deciphering the manuscripts of Husserl”, and now he is haggard-looking on Boulevard Saint-Michel constantly checking for notifications and “likes”. It’s written as a 19th century short story, but it very much describes our current situation. It ends thusly:

My presence no longer interested him very much. I watched him take the photograph and post it. He worked at incredible speed. The first likes appeared at once; his eyes lit up. For an instant, he ceased to be the lost man whose silhouette had startled me on the boulevard Saint-Michel. I pretended to have an appointment and got up to leave; he silently bade me goodbye with a wave of his hand.

page 114

La Paria (Claude Kayat, 2019)

Some writers fall in love with the French language to the point that they make it their primary language of expression. It happened to fêted dramatist Samuel Beckett, and later also to Czech existentialist Milan Kundera. Both Beckett and Kundera moved to France. Claude Kayat is a unique writer in that he writes award-winning novels in French, even though he never lived in France. He learned French as a boy in Tunisia (then a French protectorate) and maintained his love affair with the language all his life. He has lived in Sweden since 1958 and has written 9 books, this being the latest.

La Paria is the story of two lovers, but also the story of people, of getting along, of enmity and strife. The inevitable comparison here is Romeo & Juliet, and la Paria really does feel Shakespearean in tone at times. In Tiberias, northern Israel, a young boy and a young girl notice each other on a plantation. The boy, Yoram, is the son of the owner, and the girl, Fatima, is employed to pick the fruit. Yoram is blonde and Jewish, Fatima is dark-haired and Bedouin. They start to meet clandestinely at late hours and fall in love, much to the disapproval of their respective families. A big confrontation amounts and this leaves Fatima with the choice of what to do with her life… and how to foster the coming generation.

The book deals with how difficult it is to be alive and to live up to familial duties and follow one’s own heart. It is also about going against societal pressures, and respecting tradition, and standing up for one’s views and thoughts. It was an affecting read for me, as I think these questions are more important than ever in today’s mixed and globalised world. What started out as kind of a soap-opera set-up transcended its own structure and managed to really say something profound about humanity. The genius conceit of having the fruit of the lovers’ dalliance become a plot point was a master stroke, a classic Kayat touch. Some of the themes of this book might remind the attentive reader of earlier Kayat novels, like his Prix Afrique Meditérannéenne award-winning debut novel Mohammed Cohen (about a boy growing up navigating identity issues, having a Jewish father and an Arab mother, feeling fully part of both traditions). It also puts one’s mind to his later “Les cyprès de Tiberiade” which is based on his own experiences living in Israel in the mid-1950’s.

He even gets to squeeze in a little of his own Tunisian heritage in the character of Bar-Gil, a Tunisian-Jewish police investigator. One of the joys of Kayat’s writing is his effortless blending of genres, which really comes of a nothing short of virtuositic. The narrative is sometimes comic, sometimes dark, sometimes it nears being a detective novel and towards the end it veers into bildungsroman territory.

The virtuoso prose is also very poignant, such effervescence and fluidity! It is impressive to be able to have such an effortless command of the French language after over 50 years in the Nordic darkness of Stockholm. Unfortunately, it is as yet only available in French, but I would urge translators and publishers to spread this book outside of the francophonic sphere, it is really quite the gem.

three other books on the theme of Jewish-Arab love:
Waguih Ghali – Beer in the Snooker Club (1964)
Dorit Rabinyan – All the Rivers (2014)
Kamal Ruhayyim – Menorahs and Minarets (2017)

Mount Analogue (Réné Daumal, 1952)

When I realized this book had the same take on metaphorical mountain climbing as the one i’d encountered in Sloterdijk, I knew I wanted to give it a try. Unfortunately Daumal never managed to finish the manuscript, but what was there was published anyway shortly after his passing. This is something of a classic in a certain niche of religious writing, and the style is quite funny too. It makes some connections between mysticism and mountain climbing, and brings up religious traditional views on mountains like pic Meru in the Hindu tradition and and the Greek-orthodox Mount Athos. Is it a coincidence that Aleister Crowley, Peter Wessel Zappfe and Arne Naess were mountaineers? My father was a mountain climber too, by the way. Daumal introduces the concept peradam, something that can’t be found unless one is looking for it. I’m not at all up to speed about Daumal or his writing (in fact, I had at first gotten him mixed up with René Guenon, who upon closer inspection seems to be quite another kind of René). A key passage in the text is this one:

Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action. You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again…

So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully.

I thought this would contain more insights than it actually did, but hey – maybe I wasn’t looking deep enough?