San Manuel Bueno, mártir (Miguel de Unamuno, 1930)
This novella about a country priest who has lost his faith is quite beautiful in its simplicity. It discusses what real faith is, touches on the so called “noble lie” and describes how the priest with his “unfaith” paradoxically manages to awaken the deepest faith in others. It reminds me of the book by George Bernanos, Journal d’un curé de campagne. I first learned of Unamuno in Camus’ 1942 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”, which I read as a teenager. I have been meaning to read something of his ever since, but first managed to get around to it now. I’ve also had a Spanish copy of Unamuno’s “Abel Sanchéz: Una Historia de Pasion” for almost ten years, that I intended to try to spell through to improve my Spanish. This novella, however, I read in English translation.
I have always been fascinated by the notion of clergymen who lose their faith, or go through changes in ther worldview and how they tackle those issues. Therefore I could easily ingest this story, which clearly bears revisiting.
Unamuno was part of the generación ’98, and was rector at the university of Salamanca. He developed his own type of novella that he called nivola. His most famous essay is “The tragic sense of life” from 1912.
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)
This short novel is an unusual coming of age story, that is simultaneously both sensitive and brutal.
The thirteen year old boy Agostino and his mother take a leisurely boat ride every morning in the glistening sun. Agostino loves his mother but is a bit vexed when his widowed mother starts bringing a man along on the boat trips. Agostino manages to stay on the beach one day and his mother and her lover go out on the water without him. This turn of events become critical for the boy’s development, as he befriends a band of poor boys on the beach, and is introduced to their world of delinquency and abandon. His perspective on life is forever changed, and he sheds his naive and sensitive ideas.
This short book is a fine rendering of the period between childhood and adolescence where everything changes. It reminded me of “Lord of the Flies” with its portrayal of boys fighting for dominance and recognition in a group. It also deals with budding sexuality, and touches upon a similar theme as that in Louis Malle’s 1971 film “le Feu follet”. I liked the writing style, and will possibly seek out more of Moravia’s writing.
It has been pointed out that this book might have influenced Camus to write l’Etranger. Moravia was co-founder of the literary review Nuovi Argumenti in 1953, and was chair of PEN International 1959-62. He was for a time married to writer Elsa Morante. As a boy, he was bedridden because of tuberculosis (a similar fate to those of Proust and Sven Stople). This book was made into a movie in 1962, with actress Ingrid Thulin as Agostino’s mother.
This was a quick, fun read, by a writer I’ve been meaning to dip into for ages. Lodge is known for his books about academic life, and the character Morris Zapp. Those books were written later, in the 70s and 80s. Lodge has also written extensively about literary theory, and has lectured on literature for many years. I have come across his literary studies when researching “stream-of-consciousness” and other things. I also read him in a book I found in the janitorial office of a business hotel in Reykjavik in 2008, and when I pointed it out it was gifted to me by the custodian Marcin. This book “The Art of Fiction” is a collection of Lodge’s columns on literary style from the Independent on Sunday. Anyway, on with the novel!
The British Museum if Falling Down is about a young literary scholar who spends his days in the British Museum. He is also the father of three children and is afraid to have a fourth. Because he and his wife are Catholic, they are not allowed to use birth control methods. The book is set during one day in the spring of 1963 and a marker of contemporaneity is the brief discussion of Beatlemania. In the afterword it is revealed that the book is structured to be aping the prose style of ten different 20th century writers. Quite a steganographic little ruse, is it not? It also impressed upon me the idea of writing about a library. The British Library was housed in the BM until 1966. Nowadays that space is a book shoppe, and the British Library moved to another location.
A memoir by a German stormtrooper in world war one – what to make of this book? It is quite an interesting book, by a controversial writer who lived to the age of 102.
The steel in the titular storm refers to the bullets that constantly were fired between the trenches of the Germans and the allied troops. It is a very raw book, with lots of passages about death and dying, flesh wounds, hunger, fear – and explosions. What sets this book apart from most other famous World War One witness literature (e.g. E. M. Remarque, Graves, Barbusse, Sassoon) is that it isn’t explicitly written from a pacifist perspective, and it doesn’t condemn the war outright. This makes it an interesting challenge for a modern reader who has internalised and taken the pacifist position for granted. Junger’s writings offers an insight into the post-Bismarck German mindset which values the nation, and is prepared to use violence (and even sacrifice one’s life) in the service of the idea of the nation. This worldview was effectively abandoned shortly after the war and the narrative of “war is wrong” became the dominant perspective (for an extended discussion of this, cf. Niall Ferguson‘s The Pity of War). That said, I’m not pro-war by any stretch of the imagination, but i’m interested in trying to understand the ideas and thoughts of the time, and I find it fascinating that certain perspectives can be suddenly silenced during the course of history. The whole récit reminds me of a slightly forgotten violent, male-coded, aggressive part of life.
Jüngers modern-day American namesake Sebastian Junger has written a book exploring many of these war-like ideas; how many men enjoy participating in war, how loyalty and camaraderie develop among soldiers – and questions like these seem to be ignored or disregarded in the kind of middle-class circles I usually inhabit. Famed war journalist Chris Hedges was on to something when he gave one of his books the title War is a force that gives us meaning.
The book is brilliantly written and was admired by Jose Luis Borges, so much so that he made a personal pilgrimage to meet the writer in person (who lived in a small village in Southern Germany since the 50s). It was also praised by André Gide, and was the topic of essays by Clive James and Bruce Chatwin (the latter entitled “An aesthete at war”).
Dustjacket for an early English edition of the book.
A detail that struck me in the book was that the front was bombarded with reading material to boost the troops’ morale, which provided Jünger with lots of books that he mentions, like Laurence Sterne and “Britannia the Free” by Friedrich Schiller.
It is also necessary to mention when discussing this book that Ernst Jünger had some contact with the Nazi party, and he spent World War 2 as an army officer in occupied Paris. He later denounced the Nazis, but he is still to this day admired by fascists and alt-right wing sympathizers. I feel a bit uneasy summing up this book, given its fascist connections. I want to think that one could write about a book without it automatically implies one condones the ideas surrounding it. I also am uncomfortable with the idea of having to overly distance myself by profusely condemning the author. This book, and how it has been handled, presents a problem in how one should intellectually handle controversial ideas. I somehow wish I didn’t have to write this paragraph. All these extraneous thoughts (more to do with “Rezeptionsgeschichte” than the actual literary merits of the book itself) influence my appraisal of the book. But all in all, it is an engaging reading experience, where one is allowed to partake in a worldview not uncommon at the turn of the last century.
This book surprised me, but I don’t really feel qualified to write about it. It is by a poet associated with the fabled LANGUAGE school of poetry, an American group of poets in the 60s and 70s. None of the names ring any bell to me when I scan the wikipedia page, even though I have a vague sense that they have had a considerable influence in the world of poetry (not least by inspiring a group of poets from Gothenburg, Sweden who call themselves GTBRG, which include several well-known younger poets in the Swedish literary scene). Lyn Hejinian (who, contrary to my original impression, is not of armenian heritage despite her surname, which she acquired in her first marriage. Her origins are Scottish, and she grew up being called Lyn Scottie, or something or other) has written a formally “interesting” prose poem which original was written at age 37, then comprising 37 chapters about her upbringing and life. Revisited at age 45 she wrote 8 new chapters. I can’t really muster that much interest in this kind of writing. It results in a weird feeling, but I don’t know that I gain that much from that state. I wanted to read it since I’ve been lugging around it for 15 years without cracking it open once. I bought it at a library sale in 2004 or -5.
This, my first encounter with the writings of mrs Spark, has been a most satisfactory read. Muriel Spark was added to my “prospective reading” list quite recently, and this novel about a “half-Jewish” woman on a pilgrimage in the Middle East caught my interest. I have since learned that Spark has written 22 novels, and this is the longest one of them all (her usual output being rather of the length of short novels, about 100-200 pages). This was an important novel for Spark, probably because it allowed her to explore different parts of her heritage and identity. One critic pointed out that after this book, Spark turned her attention away from a writerly outlook based on realism in favour of a couple of novels grounded in surrealism (The Driver’s Seat, Not to Disturb). All fine and well, but what is the book about?
It is the story of Barbara Vaughan, a thirty-something spinster, recently converted to Catholicism (having grown up with a mixed home environment with a Protestant father and a Jewish mother) on a pilgrimage in Israel. The name of the eponymous gate might not be recognised by anyone born after 1967 but it was a makeshift passage between east Jerusalem and Jordan – a gate through which Barbara passes several times throughout the novel. Miss Vaughan has found a lover in the archaeologist Harry Clegg, digging in Potter’s field in Jordan. She is befriended by a British diplomat, Freddie Hamilton, an arab spy-cum-insurance agent-cum-tourist guide Yousef “Joe” Ramdez, the maronite tradesman Alexandros and a slew of other characters who pass in and out of this novel. Quite early in the story are we introduced to the world of spying, double-crossing, and intrigue.
This novel is plot-wise quite dense, but what I love most is the quipping prose and the steady clip of the writing. It is quite a prodigious gallery of personages that capture various aspects of life in the Middle East. (it did at least ring true to me, based on a rather meager pool of experience). It made me both want to revisit Israel and simultaneously to put it off. Actually, the book doesn’t deal much with Israel as such. It is very much a British perspective, and I was a little apprehensive as to whether that would affect my own view of the country. I was chiefly interested in reading this book to see how it handled the issue of being “half-Jewish”, a pitiable construct which does service to no-one and leaves dissatisfied all of those concerned. Here, an illuminating passage from early on in the book, when Vaughan converses with a taxi driver (oh, those conversations with Israeli taxi drivers, how I remember them):
She recalled that day she had been driven by a guide along the road to Caesarea … It was eleven in the morning:
‘A half-Jew?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which half?’
‘Through my mother.’
‘Then you are a whole Jew. The Jew inherits through the mother by Jewish Law.’
‘I know that. But one says half-Jew to mean that one of the parents is a Gentile and the other -‘
‘But the Jew inherits through the mother. You are then a full Jew by the Law.’
Yes, but not according to the Gentile parent’s law.’
‘What was your father’s Law?‘
That was a question indeed.
I’m afraid he was a law unto himself.’
(pp. 30-31)
The eponymous Mandelbaum gate in Jerusalem, discontinued after the war of 1967.
Another area of interest is the way Spark characterises the Arabs and their thinking. And the British. It has been said that this book, all things counted, is not entirely a success, compared to Sparks other books. Her style doesn’t fully flower in this mode, as it were. Not having read any other Spark books, I find myself in a unique position to judge this book without recourse to inter-oeuvre comparison -which I consider a luxurious position to be in. Spark’s writing is known for its biting wit and sharp observational style, incorporating odd characters and funny off-beat situations. This book has a few of those, and in the final part of the book, almost in excess with the mix-up mania in an old chapel in Jericho.
Late in her life, Muriel Spark was accused by her first son, Samuel Robin Spark, of being inconsiderate. This was a very sordid affair, with lots of public name-calling. It was sparked by the question of whether she is considered Jewish or not – a theme which appears throughout this book. Another of her books (Territorial Rights) includes a scene where a woman is torn apart by two lovers – which might be an image of how Spark saw her two cultural traditions. Others have analysed Spark strictly as a Catholic and have envisioned her writing style as imitating God (The Driver’s Seat has been described as a “whydunnit” as opposed to a “whodunnit” because the murdered is revealed in the first page, ergo the narrative perspective is similar to that of an all-seeing deity). Another book also has a religious theme, The Only Problem, in which the main character is grappling with the old “theodicy problem”.
Muriel Spark was appropriated by all kinds of people in the 90s, everybody wanted to claim her (a bit like the hedge runner Lyudmila Engqvist in Sweden at about the same time period), Scots, Brits, Jews, Jews, Catholics (that’s right, I wrote Jews twice because I meant first Jews as a people and second as a religion, even though the division is not made quite that easily).
Muriel Spark would have turned 100 in 2018, which prompted all those who loved her to arrange celebrations of her work, and a big centenary was organised in Royal whatever Hall in Edinburgh. The Scottish-Jewish community also made a thing of it, and a woman called Tracey S. Rosenberg wrote a follow-up to Mandelbaum Gate called “the Western Wall”.
I might continue to read Muriel Spark, but in that case it would be for her prose. Her writing doesn’t seem to imbue me with any sense of Jewish pride, which I seem to want from time to time in my reading.
Kinship of all Species 