'The Devil's Workshop' by Jáchym Topol (Review)

'Tis the season for end-of-year book lists, and while there are a fair number of really awful ones doing the rounds, I have seen a few worth perusing.  Among the books on those lists, one book which keeps cropping up is Jáchym Topol's novel The Devil's Workshop (released in the UK by Portobello Books), and as luck would have it, my library has just acquired a copy (I suspect I'm the first person to read it...).  A book which comes highly recommended then - but does it live up to the hype?

*****
The Devil's Workshop (translated by Alex Zucker) starts off with a man in a ditch, hiding from the police and running away from a city in flames (which is always an interesting way to start a novel).  Before too long, we're taken back a little to learn how he got there, ending up in the Czech town of Terezín, the site of a Nazi-era prison, the last stop before the concentration camps.

The authorities want to 'sanitise' the town, focusing the tourist industry on a small portion of Terezín, but a group of outsiders and 'death tourists' hope to keep it all as a museum.  Under the guidance of Lebo, a man born in the prison, they appeal to the outside world for help, using the narrator's computer skills to run a worldwide fundraising campaign.  Although they are initially successful, by the time Alex and Maruška arrive, the writing is on the wall for the project.  However, the two latecomers approach the narrator with an offer of similar work in their home country - and off we go to Belarus...

The Devil's Workshop is a fairly short book, but a lot happens in the space of its 160 pages.  It's a novel which draws the reader's attention to what happened in the Second World War before moving on to later atrocities; while Terezín is fairly well known (especially to anyone who has read Sebald's Austerlitz...), events that took place in Belarus are less understood.  Topol uses the structure of his book, a story in two halves, to compare and contrast the two events, creating some very clever, effective parallels.

The first half concentrates on Terezín and the 'bunk seekers', young people driven mad by their inability to understand how the Holocaust could have happened:

"Ordinary tourists strolled through Terezín like it was a medieval castle, taking snapshots, shooting videos of the dungeons and torture chambers to show the family afterwards.  The bunk seekers would never even think of such a thing.  They showed up here crazed with pain, seized by the eternal question every seeker asked:  If it happened here, can it happen again?"
p.32 (Portobello Books, 2013)

These shattered young people are only too willing to help create a Holocaust tourist industry, one underwritten by rich sympathisers, in an attempt to come to terms with the past.  Sadly though, we also get glimpses of a fascist present when the narrator witnesses the 'Patriot Guards' chasing ethnic kids through the streets of Prague (plus ça change...).

It's only when we get to Belarus that we see things in context - the second half is suddenly much darker.  Once again, we're on the run, but everything here is bigger, worse, scarier.  There are uprisings in the streets, government crack-downs, guns and knives - the people fill the enormous boulevards, filling the poor Czech narrator with fear.  The events back in Terezín now look like a provincial squabble...

It's only here that we get the true idea behind the book.  Angered by the success of memorial sites further west, Alex, Maruška and their leader, Kagan, are determined to spread the message about the massacres in Soviet-era Belarus, a Holocaust which nobody knows about.  Terezín and Auschwitz are famous - why shouldn't Khatyn join the list?  Alex reveals the plan - a museum:

"Museum, I say, looking around.  What museum?  Besides the mannequins there's nothing but crates.  Crates full of specimens.
  The museum we're building in Khatyn, Alex says.  It's going to be the most famous memorial site in the world.  The devil had his workshop here in Belarus.  The deepest graves are in Belarus.  But nobody knows about them.  That's why you're here!" (p.107)

This is no grey building filled with maps and pottery though - it's set to be a 'museum' which makes the Terezín efforts look like a kindergarten display...

The Devil's Workshop is a great, quick read, a novel which is very much action-driven, keeping the narrator (and the reader) constantly on the move.  The book is very cleverly plotted, with two parallel halves, the second being a monstrous, deformed version of the first.  The only drawback for me is that the writing is fairly simple.  It's a great story, full of thought-provoking ideas, but fairly ordinary prose.  That's a minor quibble though, and I suspect that this wouldn't be an issue for the majority of readers.

It won't be on my end-of-year list, but I did enjoy the book, and I suspect that most who read this will enjoy it too.  Given the success Holocaust-themed novels have had in recent years (e.g. Blooms of Darkness, Trieste), there's a good chance that this will be up there for the IFFP & BTBA awards next year too.  It's a twist on Holocaust literature, calling attention to other disasters, equally deserving of notice.  Of course, sadly it's also a reminder that persecution is not just a thing of the past...

'Multiples' by Adam Thirlwell (Ed.) (Review)

I first heard about today's book a good while back when McSweeney's Quarterly Concern devoted a whole edition to its game of literary Chinese Whispers.  Having been tempted to give it a go back then, I was very pleased to hear that it would be appearing elsewhere in book form - and it's now even reached Australia...

*****
Multiples, edited by Adam Thirlwell (review copy courtesy of Australian distributor Allen & Unwin), is a book centred on a simple, yet potentially dangerous, idea.  An original text is taken, translated into a second language, then translated into another language, then... you get the idea.  There are eleven strands to the book, and most of the original stories eventually end up in six different, mutated versions.  As you can imagine, the end product rarely bears much of a resemblance to the original...

The cover proclaims that the book consists of "12 stories in 18 languages by 61 authors", and if you think I'm going to review all of them, you've got another think coming.  While not all of the efforts were stellar, there were several which had me noting the writer's name down for future reference (and a couple which had me adding names to my Sheldon-Cooperesque list of mortal enemies).  The best way to look at this though is probably to take a couple of examples from the strands.

One of the shorter pieces was 'Geluk', originally written by Dutch author A.L. Snijders, and Lydia Davis' (presumably) faithful translation ('Luck') was followed by Yannick Haenel's French version, 'Chance' - one which was a lot smoother and may have betrayed the style of the original a little.  Of course, as Haenel says in his endnotes:

"And no doubt I wanted, when translating this heartbreaking text in which a young man and a young woman do not manage to fall in love, to re-establish the love that - I'm sure of it - exists between them.  I make them live together when, it seems, everything keeps them apart.  I swear that I didn't do this deliberately.  I really believed what I wrote, while I was writing it.  You see, I'm not an anarchist, a little antichrist, and above all, whether I like it or not, I am French."
p.94 (Portobello Books, 2013)

You see, it's not his fault he changed the story - his blood made him do it ;)

I was quite happy to accept Haenel's tongue-in-cheek excuses, but the next step wasn't quite as palatable.  Heidi Julavits ('Chance') back-translated Haenel's version into English, but as her French wasn't amazing she decided to use a dictionary guess the words she didn't know...  Which meant that Peter Stamm's typically elegant version ('Zufall') used, and built upon, some of the ludicrous errors Julavits incorporated (including moving the music lessons detailed in the story from the attic to the garden!).

Once Jeffrey Eugenides had given the story its third lease of life in English ('Happenstance'), it was over to Sjón to tie things up in Icelandic ('Atvik').  Sadly, I wasn't able to make much of this one, except to note that it was about a third of the length of the original.  Happily, the great man cleared this up for us in the notes - you see, he allowed his son to memorise Eugenides' version and then had him recite it back three weeks later.  And into the book it went...

Hopefully, the above description gives you the idea.  Each time the stories go through another pair of hands, something happens to them.  Sometimes the changes are minimal, occasionally the style changes radically, and in some versions the story is radically altered.  Danilo Kiš' story 'Cipele' ('Shoes') survives several interpretations virtually unscathed, but when Camille de Toledo gets hold of it, it is transformed into a tale of a writer's struggle to the death with Google Translate (and a most interesting one it is too!).  While John Banville's subsequent rendering is a beautifully elegant piece of writing, I'm not quite sure how he managed to return to something close to the original after de Toledo's effort...

Of course, these digressions are what makes Multiples worth reading; if the job had been carried out by professional translators, with larger foreign-language vocabularies and smaller egos, the end result would probably have been more accurate, but not half as entertaining.  I'm not sure many readers would have stuck around for six fairly similar renderings of a short story, especially when half of them are in a foreign language...

Having said that though, Thirlwell cleverly acknowledges that many readers will not be that proficient in foreign languages themselves, and every second story in each strand is in English.  I suppose that's just the way the world is...  English is also privileged in another way - the stories written in foreign languages actually use a slightly smaller font (possibly as the publisher isn't expecting those stories to be read as much...).

As you would expect, I gave it my best shot, and while the Icelandic, Urdu, Hebrew and Chinese stories were beyond my reach, I did attempt to read as many of the versions as I could (or thought I could, which is by no means the same thing!).  Luckily, thanks mainly to the predominance of Romance and Germanic languages, I was able to at least struggle through all but seven of the interpretations.  I'm not saying it was easy though ;)

There's one more point to be made about Multiples though, and it's one which may surprise you.  The original stories come from a variety of languages and include some by very well-known writers (e.g. Enrique Vila-Matas, László Krasznahorkai, Franz Kafka, Kenji Miyazawa), but... they don't actually appear in the book in the original form.  When I first realised this, I was a little confused (not to mention disappointed), but the further I got into the book, the more I thought that this was a shrewd decision.  You see, it seems rather apt that the reader gets to see copies of copies of an original whose existence we have to take on trust, which all makes for an elaborate construction based on a hollow centre - very deconstructionist ;)

I'm not sure this will be everyone's cup of tea (and you'll certainly enjoy it more if you have at least some background in languages), but Multiples is a fascinating look at what happens when writers are let loose on a task which really belongs in the hands of trained professionals.  While some of the authors do their best to stay on task, often doing a respectable job, many are unable to resist the temptation to adorn the texts with their own style.  Perhaps the final word, addressing this point, should go to Dave Eggers, in what is the whole of his comments on translating his Kafka piece:

"I took some liberties." (p.159)

Something A Little Like Life

After a short break, it's time for another trip to Iceland, this time courtesy of the good people over at Portobello Books.  Guðrún Eva Mínervudóttir's novel The Creator (translated by Sarah Bowen) is a strange, but entertaining novel, describing what happens when a woman meets a man - one with an unusual profession...

*****
We begin in the small town of Akranes, where Sveinn a middle-aged artisan, has just finished an exhausting bout of work on his creations.  As he moves to the kitchen to prepare his dinner, he sees a woman outside his house, struggling with a flat tyre.  Despite his fatigue, he invites her in, shares some dinner and drinks with her, and changes the tyre.  When he wakes up the next morning, the woman is gone - and so is something else.

You see, Sveinn hand-makes life-sized sex dolls, and when Lóa, his unexpected visitor, stumbles across one in his workshop, she decides to take it.  A rather unusual decision, you may say (and you'd be right), but there is a method in her madness, and it all has to do with her daughter, Margrét.  In her hungover state, Lóa thinks that her daughter, who is withdrawing from all human contact, may be able to relate better to a doll than people...

What follows is a bizarre tale, swinging back and forth between Akranes and Reykjavik, one which never quite goes the way you'd expect.  The idea of the sex doll, while important for the plot, is a bit of a red herring; The Creator is not so much about sex as it is about loneliness and longing.  All of the main characters in the novel are adrift, looking for a little attention and affection.  Sveinn's friend, Kjartan, looks for it in the shape of dolls; Lárus, a young man who gets caught up in Sveinn's mission to retrieve his goods, just wants a friend.  And as for Sveinn and Lóa...

Both have failed relationships behind them and are trying to fill the gaps in their lives (Sveinn with work, Lóa with alcohol), hoping to stop the slide before their lives crumble into pieces.  By the time the doll maker tracks down his visitor in Reykjavik, her world is already in tatters, and Sveinn finds himself having to help her hold it together.  The two seem perfect for each other - however, the fact that Sveinn thinks that Lóa is a stalker may well get in the way of a blossoming friendship.

Mínervudóttir has structured The Creator by writing chapters alternating between Sveinn and Lóa's points of view, a technique which allows the reader to see events through two pairs of eyes.  With the characters often speaking at cross purposes, it's a clever trick, one which is carried on successfully throughout the novel.  Although at times it has the effect of slowing the narrative a little too much, the skillful way in which the writer manipulates the conversations more than makes up for this.  Often it is only after hearing both sides of the story that the reader is able to gain a clearer (but never clear) understanding of what has happened, as both Sveinn and Lóa only recall parts of the conversation, omitting certain details and exaggerating or distorting others.

Although Lóa is dismissive of Sveinn's work, wondering why he would waste his talents on such a distasteful trade, he is proud of his work, confident that he can maintain the distinction between dolls and women.  As the book progresses though, it becomes painfully obvious that this is not strictly true.  On several occasions, he describes Lóa as if she were a doll:

He observed the woman sitting opposite him at the table more carefully.  She resembled typical drawings of the first women settlers: large round eyes and big shapely bosoms that rested firmly on a sturdy, solid torso, and legs like two magnificent pillars. p.11 (Portobello Books, 2012)

There's nothing sexual about his descriptions of the woman sitting opposite him - these are merely the detached musings of an artist at work...

The Creator is an entertaining and thought-provoking work, one I'm happy to recommend.  If you're looking for resolutions or happy endings, you'll be disappointed (there aren't any), but in this way the book is more reminiscent of real life than of a novel.  People change when drama occurs, but only incrementally.  Real change is a slow process, and the most you can hope for in a short period of time is a catalyst to make you stand back and have a good look at your life.  This is the effect of the events running through The Creator; whether Sveinn, Lóa and co. actually benefit from their encounter is a story for another day.

Notes from a Cold Island

As most of you will know, I'm a keen advocate of literature from all over the world, with my interests jumping around from country to country (although I always come back to Germany and Japan eventually).  My most recent obsession is writing from Iceland; I've read several books from the country already this year, and there are plenty more to come.  Which meant that when I was made aware of the book in the photo, I just had to take a closer look - especially as I wasn't quite sure if I was supposed to read it or wear it...

*****
Sarah Moss' Names for the Sea (review copy received from Granta Books) is a travel book about a year the writer recently spent living in Iceland.  At the end of her first year of university, many moons ago, she travelled around the country with a friend and always intended to pay a second, longer visit.  When an opening came up for a lecturer at the University of Iceland, she decided that it was the perfect opportunity to move her family away for a while - goodbye Canterbury, hello Reykjavik :)

Unfortunately though, her timing could have been a little bit better.  You see, Moss took up her position in Reykjavik in the middle of 2009, right at the heart of the global financial crisis.  Iceland,  previously one of the wealthiest (and smuggest) countries on earth, was faced with a devalued currency and a lot of belt-tightening (meaning that Moss' salary was suddenly worth a lot less than she'd been expecting).  It also happens that during her time abroad, one of Iceland's volcanoes decided to erupt, showering the country with ash and causing havoc with European airspace...

The writer and her family had more important things to worry about though.  While the volatility of both the Kronur and Eyjafjallajökull was unexpected, the culture shock was a much bigger problem.  Moss had to come to terms with a country where people are very suspicious of outsiders, lax in keeping an eye on their children and seemingly unable to indicate at all when driving.  Add to this the fact that the weather keeps you inside for much of the year, and you can see that life in the frozen north is not as idyllic as Moss had hoped.  And then there's the food...

Moss is a novelist, and it shows.  Names for the Sea is well written with excellent pacing, and is story-like at times.  As the book progresses, the reader is taken deeper and deeper into Icelandic society and culture, learning to look beneath the surface at the same time the writer does.  At first glance, there is no sign in Iceland of the Kreppa (the collapse of the Icelandic economy).  In a proud, equal society, happy to be different from the rest of the world, the natives continue with their disposable culture, their love of big cars (and disdain of buses) and a distinct lack of second-hand goods.

A little digging though shows that things are not quite as rosy as they appear.  As Moss gets to know the country, and the people, better, she is able to delve into the invisible cracks in the society.  She learns of a charity depot and sees people receiving food parcels on her visit.  She hears of violence towards women and the true crime statistics, surprising in a country where women have apparently broken through the glass ceiling.  Eventually, she also finds out more about Icesave, the plan to compensate foreign investors for the money the collapsed Icelandic banks took from them - and discovers that not everyone is happy to foot the bill...

Names for the Sea is a great read for anyone interested in Iceland, but there's a lot more to it than that.  The fact that Moss has uprooted her family and dumped them in a foreign environment means that there are additional pressures to the ones we expect to find in travel writing.  As well as coping with a new job, there is also the small matter of placing two young children in schools and playgroups.  In addition to learning a new language (although that is not particularly necessary for English speakers in Iceland), the writer is forced to start from scratch, furnishing a rented apartment with no car, little money and scant knowledge of local shopping customs.  I don't envy her.

However, especially in the first third of the book, I don't particularly sympathise that much either - you see, it may just be me, but I don't think she always comes across too well.  While she can recognise her cultural limitations with a wry smile at times...

"Get over it, I find myself unfairly thinking, able to identify someone else's whingeing where my own complaints are obviously those of a normal person presented with weirdness." p.115 (Granta Books, 2012)

...at others she appears oblivious to how annoying and elitist she sounds.  For example, when packing for a move to Iceland, I certainly wouldn't be opting for:

"...five litres of olive oil, a dozen tins of anchovies and a dozen jars of capers..." p.14

When she then opts to leave the toaster at home, I begin to sense that Ms. Moss and I move in different social strata...

There's more to this than a gourmet unwilling to settle for bland food though.  Her smuggling of food through customs (and the smug way in which she does so) grates, and comments like the following (made about her sons daycare hours)...

"We extend his hours, but not much, not to Icelandic levels, because we still know best." p.69

...indicate someone who, at heart, believes that she is right, and that they (whoever they may be) are wrong.

This passes though, and it's tempting to think that Moss (the writer) has created Moss (the character), a woman whose arrogance is tempered the longer she stays in Iceland.  Certainly, once the claustrophobic winter is over, and there is more opportunity to travel and meet the natives, the style changes.  The book becomes more about the country and the problems it faces than the writer's issues with settling down in an unfamiliar environment.

Overall, Names for the Sea is a very good book, informative, thought-provoking and well written.  It's a shame that Moss was unable to stay for longer than one year, as more time spent in Iceland would probably have led to an even deeper understanding of the natives.  Of course, no matter how long you spend in a country, you're unlikely to uncover all of its secrets (after a decade in Australia, I'm not even close...).  In one of her classes at the university, Moss discusses travel writing with her students, telling them:

"Home... is the paper on which travel writes.  Travel writers are always writing home." p.110

The more I think about Names for the Sea, the more fitting this information becomes.  As much as the book is about its subject, it also says a lot about the writer...