'Holzfällen' ('Woodcutters') by Thomas Bernhard (Review)

German Literature Month rolls on, and so too does the bus, taking us to the next stop on our literary travels.  Today we're off to Vienna, where we're expected at a dinner party, or rather "an artistic supper".  The hosts, and the guests, are friendly and welcoming - although, there is this one man...

*****
That man, of course, is the barely-concealed alter-ego of Austrian writer Thomas Berhard, and the book is his novel Holzfällen (Woodcutters***).  It's a deceptively rambling novel, a story that unfolds over more than three-hundred pages of circling vitriol from a man who despises the company he finds himself in.

The narrator is seated in a comfortable chair in a dark corner, having been invited by some old acquaintances to attend their:

"...künstlerischen Abdendessen mit dem berühmten Burgschauspieler."
p.39 (Suhrkamp, 2012).

This arty supper, ostensibly in honour of a famous stage actor, happens to coincide with a rather more sombre event, the funeral of a former friend.  Joana, a failed dancer and actress, hung herself in her home in the country, and the narrator (a thinly-veiled Bernhard) and the rest of the Viennese cultural milieu have paid their final respects before moving on to an evening of food and theatre chatter.

As we wait for the guest of honour to arrive, the narrator sits in his chair, scowling upon the other guests as they prattle on in the room across the hall.  Recently returned to Vienna after a long, self-imposed exile in London, he despises the empty-headed, vain, self-serving world of the Viennese literati and sits in judgement on them from his dark throne - and still we wait for the actor to arrive...

Holzfällen is my first view of Bernhard's world, but it was pretty much everything I'd expected it to be from the reviews and comments I'd read.  The thirty pages or so that I read in the first sitting were a confronting, circular mass of sentences, deliberate repetition building into a dizzying wall of words seemingly intended to obscure meaning and prevent progress into the heart of the story.  Slowly though I began to make headway, and once I'd become more accustomed to the style, the story started to make sense.  Again and again, we return to the focal points of the story, the writer sitting in his chair, and the moment when he accepts the invitation from his former acquaintances, thus undoing the work of several decades of exile in a moment.

It's a moment of weakness which he regrets, loathing as he does the cultural side of his former home:

"Diese entsetzliche Stadt Wien, dachte ich, die mich tief in die Verzweiflung und tatsächlich wieder einmal in nichts als in Ausweglosigkeit gestürzt hat..." (p.11)

"This horrendous city Vienna, I thought, which had plunged me deep into despair and, once again, into nothing but hopelessness..." (My translation)

It's a city which attracts would-be artists and writers from the provinces, sucking them in, then chewing them up and spitting them out, broken, damaged.  As he muses:

"Wien ist eine fürchterliche Genievernichtungsmaschine, dachte ich auf dem Ohrensessel, eine entsetzliche Talentezertrümmerungsanstalt." (p.97)

"Vienna is a terrible Genius-destruction machine, I thought in the wing chair, a horrendous talent-destruction installation."

The supper he has come to take part in, with its self-gratulating writers and alcoholic musicians is unlikely to soften him in his views.

The death of Joana, a woman he was once very close to, is the proof we are given of this terrible world.  Drawn to the metropolis at an early age, she becomes a part of the cultural community but never quite manages to make it, and when things go wrong, she is abandoned, only to be patronised and fondly remembered after her death.  The unfortunate, coincidental scheduling of the supper on the day of the funeral seems oddly apt - not even death stops the literary schmoozing...

The central image of the writer sitting and thinking in his 'Ohrensessel' (translated as 'wing chair' in the English version) is one of a tyrant sitting in judgement over the guilty.  From his dark corner, he can see the other guests in the brightly-lit room while they can only see an outline through the clouds of cigarette smoke, a vaguely-suspected image sitting silently and yet with a presence felt from a distance.  He casts down his unheard thunderbolts on the uneasy Viennese, punishing them mentally for their fakeness, their unceasing pursuit of public honours and, above all, for their ceaseless chatter.

However, the longer the novel goes on, the more the reader sees cracks appear in the writer's facade and story.  The truth is that he is as guilty as all the others of using those around and above him to make his way to the top, financially and sexually, and if anyone is to be blamed for abandoning poor Joana, he would be right near the top of the list...

Holzfällen is a novel which takes some getting used to, but once you have caught the circular rhythm, it's a joy to read, a hypnotic style of writing which, while appearing slightly random, is actually incredibly-tightly plotted.  This circular, repetitive motion, the structure of a single, gigantic paragraph, and the constant reminders that a story is being told (we are constantly torn back from a story by "...I thought..." and "...as I sat in the wing chair...") are unmistakably Sebaldian.  Except, of course, that it is actually the other way round - in many ways Sebald is Bernhardian.  Having read a lot about the influence Sebald has had on writing over the past decade or two, it's nice to see who influenced him :)

Of course, the question you probably won't be are all asking is whether the actor actually ever arrives at the supper (and whether the writer ever makes it out of his comfy chair).  I'll let you find that out for yourselves - you can't expect me to tell you everything ;)  Rest assured though, the tone remains the same, and the writer retains his bitter demeanour for the whole of the novel.  And that's something to enjoy...

*****
The English-language version (Woodcutters, translated by David McLintock) is available from Faber and Faber.

January in Japan 2014

We interrupt coverage of German Literature Month for a breaking news flash - it has just been announced that January in Japan will be back in 2014!  Yes, that's right, another month of J-Lit wonders to enjoy as you struggle through the cold winter days (or go to the beach - depends where you are...).  January is also the last month of Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge, so the event will give you all a reason to fit in a final book or two before it's all over.

So, what's it all about?  Pretty simple, really.  You just have to read, and review, any work of Japanese literature next January and then post the review to the January in Japan Blog.  Last year, we had about seventy reviews, of all kinds of books (classics to crime, romance to non-fiction), and I'm hoping for more this time around.  Remember - anything is OK, as long as it's made in Japan ;)

That's not all though.  Last year saw the start of the J-Lit Giants project, easy introductions to big names in Japanese literature, with seven posts contributed by myself and a few other bloggers.  This year, I hope to continue the series, and I'd appreciate your help with this.  If anyone is interested in submitting a piece, please let me know, and we can arrange for you to add to the list of biographies.  I'd be particularly interested in having people write about female writers as there was no giantess among the first group of giants...

Once again, I'll be trying to keep up with the literary news from Japan (and it's amazing how much there is when you actively look for it).  If anyone has any favourite sites, just send me the links as I'd love to add them to the list (which badly needs overhauling...).  I'm also sure that Momotarō will be back each Sunday with his Nichi-Yōbi News segment, keeping us all up-to-date with what's happening ;) 

In short, then:

- Keep a reading spot in January free for J-Lit

- Think about who should be in the next group of inductees for our Hall of Fame

- Send me your links to great J-Lit sites

Oh, and there may well be a readalong and (if you're lucky) also a prize or two.  So, what are you waiting for?  Bookmark the January in Japan blog today:)

'Austerlitz' by W.G. Sebald (Review)

Time for more from German Literature Month, and today we're looking at a male author, one a few of you may have heard of.  I loved my first book by W.G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn), so I've been meaning to get to today's offering for a long time - and what better time than November?  Time to hop on board the bus for another Sebaldian journey of discovery :)

*****
Austerlitz*** sees an unnamed narrator, on a pointless trip to the Belgian city of Antwerp, make a chance acquaintance in an ostentatious railway station waiting room.  The person he meets, Jacques Austerlitz, is a man obsessed with buildings and form, travelling all over western Europe to inspect and photograph the architecture, and a rapport soon arises between the two men.

Despite this, they make no real plans to meet in the future, and their subsequent meetings are, once again, bizarrely random.  Even more unusual is the way that Austerlitz treats each meeting as a continuation of the last conversation, starting off their chats where they had broken off last time.  Of course, 'chats' is probably a misnomer - in reality, the book consists of Austerlitz telling his new acquaintance his story.  It's worth it though, a tale of a boy, two names and a continent at war...

Austerlitz is a holocaust story with a difference; in fact, we're not even sure it is one until half-way through.  The title character is a boy whose identity is a mystery - having grown up as Dafydd Elias in the Welsh countryside, it comes as quite a shock for him to find out that his real name is Jacques Austerlitz.  Part of the delay in finding out the man's identity lies squarely on his own shoulders though, as he deliberately looks the other way for most of his life, afraid of what he might find.  By the time he belatedly decides to search for information about his background, we sense that it might be too late (although we're also not entirely sure that it matters that much...).

Everything in the novel, despite the languid manner, is carefully planned.  Nothing is left to chance, and every detail reappears in its right place later in the story.  Near the start, the narrator offers the reader descriptions of Antwerp's old defensive walls and estates for workers to reside in.  Little do we know at the time that these off-the-cuff remarks actually foreshadow more ominous versions of the buildings later in the text.  Buildings, stars, pictures, tents in the desert - in Sebald's work, everything has its place...

The story, and the events described within it, go back and forth, are unpredictable.  Buildings in London echo train stations on the continent, lakes in different countries evoke echoes of each other (even when one of them is hiding a chilling secret).  Every detail contributes to a greater idea, another piece in the puzzle, at times a matter of life and death:

"An der wand über der niedrigen Werkbank Evans, sagte Austerlitz, hing von einem Haken der schwarze Schleier, den der Großvater von der Bahre abgenommen hatte, als die kleinen vermummten Gestalten sie vorübertrugen an ihm, und gewiß ist es Evans gewesen, sagte Austerlitz, der mir einmal sagte, mehr als ein solches Seidentuch trenne uns nicht von der nächsten Welt."
pp.83/4 (Fischer Verlag, 2011)

"On the wall above Evans' low work bench, said Austerlitz, there hung from a hook the black veil which Evans' Grandfather had taken from the funeral bier as the small, masked figures carried it past him, and it must also have been Evans, said Austerlitz, who told me once that nothing more than such a piece of silk separates us from the next life." (my translation)

Life and death, apparently, are closer together than we like to think.

This is, according to Sebald (according to Austerlitz) because time is like a river.  It flows, just like the text, but not in a straight, usual, temporal manner.  The writer provides us with frequent reminders that the past and future are always there, ready to be unlocked when someone finds the right key:

"Es scheint mir nicht, sagte Austerlitz, daß wir die Gesetze verstehen, unter denen sich die Widerkunft der Vergangenheit vollzieht, doch ist es mir immer mehr, als gäbe es überhaupt keine Zeit, sondern nur verschiedene, nach einer höheren Stereometrie ineinander verschachtelte Räume, zwischen denen die Lebendigen und die Toten, je nachdem es ihnen zumute ist, hin und her gehen können, und je länger ich es bedenke, desto mehr kommt mir vor, daß wir, die wir uns noch am Leben befinden, in den Augen der Toten irreale und nur manchmal, unter bestimmten Lichtverhältnissen und atmosphärischen Bedingungen sichtbar werdende Wesen sind." (p.269)

"It seems to me, said Austerlitz, that we don't understand the laws, through which the eternal repetition of the past occurs, but I feel more and more as if there is no time, rather just various rooms, nestled inside each other according to a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead, as they desire, can go back and forth, and the longer I consider it, the more I realise that we, who are still to be found in the land of the living, become, in the eyes of the dead, unreal and, only occasionally, under certain circumstances of light and atmospheric conditions, visible beings."

Austerlitz, unsurprisingly, is a man with no time for watches...

While Sebald plays up the idea of the closeness of the living and the dead, he prefers the reader and the action to be as far apart as possible.  As seen above, the narrator frequently reminds us that Austerlitz is speaking, taking us further away from the action being related.  In fact, at several points, we get third-, or even fourth-hand knowledge, where (for example) the narrator tells us what Austerlitz tells him of a story related by a character named Věra, who in turn is recounting the words of a man called Maximillian...

Another aspect of his style, as you may have noticed above, is his predilection for what I like to call 'Russian Doll' sentences, a mesmerising creation of clause within clause, with detail upon detail piling up until you can barely recall where, or why, the idea started.  I spent a long time translating the few lines above - trust me, I know what I'm talking about!  On top of this, the book consists of a few gigantic paragraphs, an immense wall of words, a decision which makes knowing when to stop reading a rather difficult task.  Where do you stop for the night, when the novel never really stops?

I say 'novel', but Sebald does his best to convince us at times that Austerlitz is anything but.  The book already appears more like a work of non-fiction than a story, and the frequent use of photographs to accompany the people and places described can put a momentary doubt in your mind.  In the first part of the book, especially, we seem so far away from any kind of plot, or even forward momentum, that the average reader will begin to doubt that they exist.  Slowly, inexorably, though, the scales fall from our eyes, and we begin to discern the slow, steady approach of the Nazi horrors.  And why should we rush towards that...

Austerlitz is another superb book that defies description and categorisation, as much as I've tried to do both here today.  It's a work which shows us that the line between fiction and non-fiction is a rather blurred one, and that the past and present aren't quite as distinct as we might think either.  This is a book I recommend you try, and if you do, I'm sure that you, like me, will want to read more of his work.  Add me to the list of Sebald completists ;)

*****
*** An English-language version of Austerlitz, translated by Anthea Bell, is available from Random House

'Was bleibt' ('What Remains') by Christa Wolf (Review)

German Literature Month is in full swing, and as it's still Ladies' Week, I have another review of a book by a female writer for you.  It's actually quite a short work, one you can zip through in an hour or so - its importance though goes far beyond its pages...

*****
Christa Wolf's Was bleibt (What Remains)*** is a novella set in the late 1970s in East Berlin.  A female writer has recently become aware of a disturbing development, where several men are constantly parked outside her house.  Every morning when she opens her curtains, they are there, patiently sitting the day away, not really doing anything, just reminding the writer that Big Brother is watching.

The novella records one day in this period of her life, from waking up to going to bed, an attempt to imprint the events in her mind for the time, far in the future, when she will be able to find the words to document the events clearly.  It's very tempting for the reader to read things into this idea - unsurprising when you consider that the book was written in 1979 but didn't appear until 1990...

It's a story of a society in stasis, a country where life is slowly ebbing away.  Both the writer and the city seem cold and grey.  A fire has died out inside, and as far as the eye can see, it's cold, drab and pitiless.  As the writer goes about her day, we see her looking for warmth and signs of life: she gets involved in a conversation with a woman at the bottle shop; she receives a visit from a young writer who has just been released from prison; and she gets several letters, some more welcome than others.

The observation, while a fairly unobtrusive one for the most part, is intended to wear the writer down mentally:

"Einschüchterung nenne man das, sagte ein Bekannter, der genau Bescheid zu wissen vorgab, aber waren wir eingeschüchtert?"
p.25 (Suhrkamp, 2012)

"Intimidation is what that's called, said an acquaintance of mine, who claimed to know about these things, but were we intimidated?"
(my translation)

The answer, of course, is yes.  The effects of the observation are clear as the writer is obviously stressed and suffering from nightmares.  She's even finding it difficult to write, too busy worrying about what might happen.  A pointless break-in which leaves a bathroom mirror shattered shows that she is right to be concerned...

The writer spends much of her day involved in dialogues in her head - monologues, as she says are pointless.  She finds herself talking and arguing with those who are oppressing her, even if she realises that it's pointless to talk to an unknown entity:

"Und wie anders als kindlich, kindisch, sollte man die unaufhörlichen Gedankenmonologen nennen, auf denen ich mich ertappte und die allzuoft in der absurden Frage endeten: Was wollt ihr eigentlich?  Wieviel ich noch zu lernen hatte!  Eine Institution anreden als sei sie ein Mensch!" (p.18)

"And how, other than childlike, childish, can you describe the constant internal monologues in which I caught myself and which all too often ended in the absurd question: What do you want?  I still had so much to learn!  Talking to an institution as if it were a person!"

Still, you can understand her frustration.  With no real face to her enemy (her observers are very much faceless), she is destined to continually torment herself with thoughts of how to change the unchangeable, to escape the inescapable.

The end of the novella though gives her hope for a brighter future, and it comes, naturally, in the form of the young, the students who talk to her after her reading.  She goes to bed confident that while today is grey and depressing, tomorrow (or the day after that) might just be a little sunnier, a little brighter...

*****
Was bleibt is an interesting little piece, but it's not really one of Wolf's major works.  However, it has a cultural significance which goes far beyond its ninety pages.  Its real importance is to do with the (to use a beloved neo-Germanism) 'shitstorm' which erupted on its publication - this was a book which really shook up the German literary establishment.

Why?  Well, Wolf waited until after reunification to bring it to public attention, despite having written it back in 1979, and many writers and critics saw this as opportunism, even cowardice.  If the book had been released back in the 1970s, some claimed, it may have had a major impact on the way the Stasi carried out their observations.  Instead, they argued, Wolf sat on it to protect her own comfort...

I won't go into all that here, but the German Wikipedia page for Was bleibt goes into the debate in detail.  As a book, Was bleibt is fairly average and of only minor interest.  However, as a document of writing under Communism - and of the culture wars that followed its demise - it's well worth reading :)

*****
***An English-language version (What Remains and Other Stories, translated by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian) was available from Virago Press - you may have to look for a second-hand copy though.

October 2013 Wrap-Up

October was spent in a relaxed manner, reading and rereading whatever I felt like.  It was also the month in which I notched up the century for the year (and wrote a post celebrating an early bloggerversary!).

And now, in detail...

*****
Total Books Read: 14
Year-to-Date: 108

New: 9

Rereads: 5

From the Shelves: 9
Review Copies: 2

From the Library:2

On the Kindle: 1

Novels: 6
Novellas:4

Short Stories:3
Non-Fiction: 1

Non-English Language: 11 (5 German, 4 Japanese, Polish, Chinese)

In Original Language: 5 (5 German)

Aussie Author Challenge: 2 (5/3)
Japanese Literature Challenge 7: 4 (13/1)

*****
Books reviewed in October were:

1) A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard
2) Bariloche by Andrés Neuman
3) The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
4) Le Colonel Chabert by Honoré de Balzac
5) Cocaine by Pitigrilli
6) Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall
7) The Swimmers by Joaquín Perez Azaústre
8) Bullfight by Yasushi Inoue
9) Happy Valley by Patrick White
10) My Blood's Country by Fiona Capp

Tony's Turkey for October is: Nothing

Another turkey-free month (it's going to be a lean Christmas at this rate...).

Tony's Recommendation for October is:

Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name

There were several good reads in this bunch.  Special mentions go to The Swimmers and Bullfight, and I also enjoyed the second Knausgaard book more than I'd expected.  However, the second part of Ferrante's series was easily the highlight of the month, a book I'd highly recommend :)

*****
November, as regular readers will know, means just one thing - German Literature Month!  Next month's reviews will be full of great G-Lit, with normal service resumed in December :)

'Nichts als Gespenster' ('Nothing but Ghosts') by Judith Hermann (Review)

Welcome, once again, to German Literature Month!  For the third year in a row, Lizzy and Caroline have thrown down the gauntlet of thirty days of German-language books and reviews, and I (as ever) am more than happy to take up the challenge.  The shelves have been tidied up, the Kindle's fully charged, and the German Literature Month bus has come back from the workshop ready to take us all on a magical mystery tour through the corners of the G-Lit world :)

This year's event has female writers as its focus, and while I'm not promising that I'll manage a fifty-fifty split, I am hoping to review a few books by women over the course of the next month - starting today...

*****
Judith Hermann is a writer who first came to my attention when I read Alice for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shadowing in 2012.  Last year, I also tried and enjoyed her first book, Sommerhaus, später (Summerhouse, Later), so it was only a matter of time before I got around to her only other work of fiction.  It's a longer collection, and this time we've left Berlin (mostly) behind - we're on the road...

Nichts als Gespenster (Nothing but Ghosts***) only contains seven stories, but it clocks in at about 320 pages.  While there are a couple of thirty-page stories, the longest, at sixty pages, is actually more of a novella.  The focus is on travel and seeing new places, but Hermann's protagonists are far from being happy travellers.  They are mainly women in their thirties with a lot of stuff to work through - in Hermann's drab, grey world, travel appears to be a sort of therapy.

In 'Acqua Alta', a depressed woman who has just turned thirty travels to Venice to meet up with her parents.  Far from enjoying the trip, she feels a little worse than before, particularly after a chance encounter on a crowded bridge.  'Zuhälter' ('Pimp')  takes place in the Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary, and the narrator once again sets out on a trip she's not really sure she wants to make:

"Vielleicht dachte ich daran, daß ich diesen Moment gerne hinausgezögert hätte, den Moment, bevor jemand die Tür aufmacht und mein Gesicht einen Ausdruck annimmt, um den Ich nicht weiß, aber ich bin mir sicher, daß ich auch daran nicht gedacht habe."
p.158 (Fischer Verlag, 2012)

"Perhaps I was thinking that I would have liked to draw out this moment, the moment before someone opens the door and my face takes on an expression, I don't know what kind, but I'm sure that I wasn't thinking that at all." (My translation)

Travelling is good, but arriving isn't always desirable...

There's a sense of strangeness running through the stories.  'Ruth (Freundinnen)' ('Ruth

(Girlfriends)') is a tale of a bizarre, unconventional one-night stand, where the narrator betrays her closest friend with an arrogant gigolo.  In 'Zuhälter', one of the characters suffers a laughing fit half-way through, one which lasts so long that it goes beyond the funny or hysterical and begins to verge on creepy.  One of the strangest stories though is the last one, 'Die Liebe zu Ari Oskarsson' ('The Love for Ari Oskarsson'), which begins with a trip to the Norwegian town of Tromsø and ends with an unusual night on the tiles...

In addition, the (mainly) first-person narrators don't exactly make it easy for you to immerse yourself in the stories, as many of them aren't very nice.  The voice of 'Wohin des Wegs' ('Where Are You Going?') is a calculating, selfish woman, leading her friend on and trampling over his feelings.  While this is a story where she's looking back at past events, there are enough clues to suggest that this will happen again to her present partner.  The betrayal in 'Ruth (Freundinnen)' is, as discussed, a particularly nasty one, and even in 'Acqua Alta' the seemingly passive protagonist comes across as a selfish, childish woman.

On finishing the collection though, the dominant idea for me was the collection of strong, overbearing men.  The women in the collection, while ostensibly in the spotlight, are there merely to suffer in silence.  There's abuse both physical (a sleazy man on a bridge in 'Acqua Alta', a slap and a spit in 'Zuhälter') and mental (the way Johannes drags his friend to Karlovy Vary in 'Zuhälter' and Raoul's unbearable arrogance in 'Ruth (Freundinnen)').  Even the men who aren't trying to assert their dominance are such large, loud characters (like Jonas in the Icelandic-set story 'Kaltblau' ('Cold-Blue')) that the women fade in their larger-than-life presence.  This female passivity pervades the book, and many readers might be put off by the constant macho displays.

Some of the stories don't really work, and as they're all long, that's an issue.  Some do though, and they're usually the ones where a little hope shines through.  'Kaltblau' is one I enjoyed, a story with a great dual-strand plot and a slight twist at the end.  While the ending is not exactly happy, there is a glimmer of hope.

The title story 'Nichts als Gespenster' ('Nothing but Ghosts') is another I enjoyed, a laid-back tale of a chance encounter in desert-town USA.  Again, we meet a man who at first glance appears to be the typical Hermann alpha male:

"Das, was an Buddy anziehend war, worauf Felix reagierte - Ellen hatte später oft nach einem Wort dafür gesucht und schließlich eines gefunden, das ihr nicht gefiel und das sie dennoch für passend hielt -, war seine Dominanz.  Seine Sicherheit, so etwas wie eine sichtbare Kraft und Konzentration, die ihn umgab, er war ein Wortführer, ohne daß er viel gesprochen hätte." (p.214)

"What was attractive about Buddy, and what Felix reacted to - later Ellen often searched for a word to describe it and finally found one which didn't please her and yet which she found suitable - was his dominance.  His certainty, something like a visible strength and concentration which surrounded him, he was a spokesman, a leader, without actually saying much."

Buddy though is actually one of the more sympathetic men in the book, and his charisma is perhaps what Hermann was trying to portray all along...

I've had a good look around at other reviews, and this book seems to have got a very mixed reception online and in the press.  The disappointment some readers have felt is
probably due to the desire for another Sommerhaus, später - and to the frustration at not getting it.  Nichts als Gespenster is a much darker book, in many ways even more so than Alice.  It's not for everyone, but there are some enjoyable stories here; you just have to look hard enough :)

*****
***There is an English-language version available: Nothing but Ghosts, published by Fourth Estate, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo

'My Blood's Country' by Fiona Capp (Review)

It's time for the last of my Christmas Humbook books, the second of Lisa's choices - and it was left to last for a reason.  Firstly, it's a biography (I don't read many of them); secondly, it's a biography of a poet (I'm not much of a fan of poetry); thirdly, it discusses a poet I'd never heard of...

Hmm, long odds here.  So, what will I make of this one?

*****
My Blood's Country is an attempt by writer and journalist Fiona Capp to follow in the footsteps of poet and activist Judith Wright, a very well-known Australian (well, to anyone born here, anyway!).  Capp met Wright for the first time when the older poet came to talk to her school, and she has been obsessed with her work ever since, also keeping up a relationship through letters and occasional visits.

After Wright's death, Capp goes on a pilgrimage of sorts, visiting the three main areas where Wright spent her life in the hope of understanding the effect the environment played on the poetry.  There is another motive however.  She is also half-hoping to see traces of Wright herself in the places she visits...

My Blood's Country isn't a biography as such; it's really more of a travel book.  Capp takes the reader on a trip to the New England plains in New South Wales, Mount Tambourine in Queensland and Mongarlowe, away in the Canberra Hinterland.  By seeing where Wright lived, we (hopefully) will understand her poetry more and also gain an insight into some of her other passions.

While it's not a biography though, we do get a fair bit of information about the poet's life.  Wright comes from a famous farming family in New England, one which owned vast tracts of land, and her grandmother May, the Wright matriarch, shrewdly made the family's fortune with her sound management of the estates.

Judith Wright was initially proud of her background, but in later life she began to turn away from this view.  She started to see the darker side of the family's fortunes, and as a woman (in a family which became ironically patriarchal) she was never going to inherit the land.  In fact, she was destined to lose it completely as one of her brothers overextended and had to sell up, information which had Capp musing:

"The irony, I couldn't help thinking as I wandered the garden at Wallamumbi, was that her exclusion from ownership of the property and the inevitable sense of exile this bred was what had made her a poet.  As is often the case with those whose great achievement is to transform their personal suffering or pain into a work of art, her loss was our gain."
p.47 (Allen & Unwin, 2012)

The loss of Wright's childhood home was a double-edged sword - a sad affair, but one which helped make her the poet she was...

Wright also began to realise the role her family had played in the displacement of the local Indigenous people, with her parents' wealth coming at the expense of the traditional way of life.  When her father reveals the story behind the name of a rock called 'Darkies' Point', she is horrified, and this shock and anger helps propel her into her later career as an activist for reform.

It's the environment though which seemed to be Wright's major love.  Capp concentrates on the natural features of the places the poet lived, and each of three main homes showcases a different feature of Australian nature.  There are beautiful descriptions of the tablelands, the subtropics and the bush, and Capp learns from Wright of the importance of native plants.

Moving away from Wright though, My Blood's Country is just as much about Capp herself as it is about her subject.  This is, in part, her story, an attempt to understand the woman she regarded as a mentor and a friend.  Wright imparted her first advice when Capp was a schoolgirl - in a polite letter:

"I think one of the best disciplines I know of, for young Australians brought up on a diet of English poetry, is to study Chinese and Japanese poems - if not in the original, which you probably never will be able to, then in the best translations you can get.  Their kind of aesthetic, which is a bad word for something important, is much sterner and less sloppy than ours, and it does anyone good to try to pare down words to essentials and to see things clearly." (p.5)

The stripped-back style of Japanese and Chinese poetry obviously had its appeal for Wright at that period of her life, and Capp comments that it is typical for her stark, simple writing.

Capp's hope of retracing Wright's steps in order to better understand her, to somehow reencounter her, are doomed to failure though.  Nothing remains of the past, and the quest becomes an impossible, elusive journey.  The younger writer is disappointed by how the reality differs from the images (gleaned from poems) in her head...

My Blood's Country is an interesting read, even if it's a little confused in its focus.  What is it meant to be?  Is it a biography, a travel book or a story of self-discovery?  It's enjoyable enough, but I suspect that it would be a lot more so if you had heard of the writer before reading it.  Lisa hinted that finishing this book would leave me wanting to try Wright's poems - I'm not so convinced, but you never know...

Before I leave you though, there was one coincidental connection I discovered while reading the book.  Wright's daughter, Meredith McKinney, is a renowned translator of Japanese literature, having brought several classics into English, including... Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura.  And?  Well, I'm a big fan of his (I reread this book very recently), and this was one of my return Humbook choices!

Over to you, Lisa ;)

'Happy Valley' by Patrick White (Review)

After my recent review of Le Colonel Chabert, today it's time for the second of my Christmas Humbook selections.  Lisa, of ANZ LitLovers LitBlog, chose a couple of Aussie books for me to try, and this post looks at the first of them.  The novel is not widely read, but the writer is very well-known...

*****
Patrick White is still Australia's only real Nobel Prize for Literature winner (for me, the South-African import J.M. Coetzee doesn't really count...), and Happy Valley, brought out in the Text Classics series, was his first novel, a book which he refused to allow to be republished during his lifetime.  It's a shame because it's a great read, an addition to the body of Australian country literature and an ideal entry into White's work for new readers.

Happy Valley is a small town in country New South Wales, and the story takes place in the mid-to-late 1930s.  It used to be a gold-mining boom town, but now it's sparsely populated, a sleepy bush town with little going on.  The first few chapters introduce us to the town, and some of its residents, seen through the (cinematic) eyes of a hawk, hovering high overhead.  This artistic touch is soon addressed in true Aussie fashion though, as several of the characters think about shooting it down...

In these first few chapters, we meet several pivotal characters.  There's a new arrival, farm manager Clem Hagan, brought in to oversee work on the land of the Furlow family, and Doctor Oliver Halliday, bored of marriage and bored of life in Happy Valley.  Among the women, we meet potential spinster Alys Browne, and Sidney Furlow, a local heiress, beautiful and cold.  And always in the background, the Quongs, descendants of a Chinese immigrant, shopkeepers and silent witnesses to what happens in the town.

On the one hand, Happy Valley is one of those typical tales of the Australian country with its blistering summer heat, isolation, and bushfires.  There's a sense familiar to anyone who's read Oz-Lit before.  One of the minor characters, Sidney's English suitor, feels completely out of his depth:

"There is something here completely foreign to anything I know, felt Roger Kemble, those hands that touch a different substance, and despising what I touch."
p.167 (Text Classics, 2012)

The reader, however, is in very familiar territory.

White draws a skillful picture of the isolated town, small and run-down:

"Happy Valley became that peculiarly tenacious scab on the body of the brown earth.  You waited for it to come away leaving a patch of pinkness underneath.  You waited and it did not happen, and because of this you felt there was something in its nature particularly perverse." (p.138)

It's a town of few amusements, just the pub, the weekly picture hall and the annual races, and in a place where everyone knows everyone else, the arrival of a stranger (Hagan) is a big event.  What really raises interest though is when bored men and women start to look around for something to distract themselves from the torpor of everyday existence - now infidelity is really interesting...

At the heart of the story are the attempts some characters make to break free of the crushing gravitational pull of the town.  Vic Moriarty, the frustrated wife of the sickly local teacher is drawn to bad boy Clem (who also has his eyes fixed elsewhere...).  Dr. Halliday, trapped in a loveless marriage with an older woman, is looking for a transfer to Queensland, but is distracted by a blossoming friendship.  Alys Browne wants to escape to California, and is waiting for her ship (or her shares) to come in.  Many want to leave the town - it's doubtful though whether they'll actually ever manage it...

Happy Valley is a book built around the main love triangles, but there's so much more to enjoy.  White creates a great ensemble cast of characters, including the inscrutable Quongs.  The family faces subtle (and unsubtle) discrimination, looked down upon by the Anglo residents, tolerated for their use in providing daily goods.  Yet they are actually the locals, there from start to finish - the whites are the ones who are simply passing through...

In addition to the interesting plot, the book is also notable for the language used.  After the first few introductory chapters, the language becomes more complex, and there is a definite stream-of-consciousness style, with obvious influences.  Many passages evoke Woolf, and at the heart of the novel the writing becomes almost Joycean in its confusion:

"The wind is wind is water wind or water white in pockets of the eyes was once a sheep before time froze the plover call alew aloo atingle is the wire that white voice across the plain on thistle thorn the wind pricks face the licked fire the wind flame tossing out distance on a reel." (p.225)

Thoughts intermingle, sentences start and trail off, cut down by new thoughts, only half-expressed...  It's not easy to push through at times, but it's always worth it.

As far as I know, there's no paperback version of Happy Valley out yet.  Hopefully, it's on its way as it's a fascinating book, and a worthy introduction to a great writer, one more people should try.  Don't be fooled by the name of the book though - Happy Valley?  Only in the ironic Australian use of the word:

"There never was co-operation in Happy Valley, not even in the matter of living, or you might even say less in the matter of living.  In Happy Valley the people existed in spite of each other." (pp.27/8)

Ah, Australia...

'Bullfight' by Yasushi Inoue (Review)

You'd think that three Ryu Murakami reissues and a new translation into English would be enough Japanese books for a publisher for one year, but Pushkin Press have decided to take a further step in 2013 with their foray into J-Lit.  The latest book to appear is a classic novella, one which looks at life in post-war Japan, with particular reference to newspapers and bulls...

*****
Yasushi Inoue's Bullfight (new translation by Michael Emmerich, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is set in Osaka between December 1946 and January 1947.  Tsugami, editor-in-chief of the Osaka New Evening Post, is a successful man, a journalist who has worked his way up to an important position.  However, he feels that there's something missing in his life and longs to make a big coup.  It's at this point that Tashiro, a rather shady character, approaches him and makes an unorthodox proposal - why not organise a bullfight, here, in Osaka?

What at first glance seems a stupid idea quickly becomes more attractive.  In the rubble of post-war Japan, people are desperate for entertainment, especially if they can gamble on it:

"Betting, he was thinking, yes, this could work.  Everyone would put money on the bulls - it would be no different here in the urban Hanshin region than it was in W.  In these postwar days, perhaps this was just the sort of thing the Japanese needed if they were going to keep struggling through their lives."
p.19 (Pushkin Press, 2013)

Tsugami quickly decides to support the venture and begins drumming up support at the newspaper.  The event, featuring twenty-two snorting beasts transported north from Shikoku, will take place in January at the famous Hanshin (Koshien) baseball stadium.  He'll build it - but will they come?

Bullfight is an absorbing little book, 120 pages that slip by in no time.  The focus is squarely on Tsugami, a man who has found the challenge he's been looking for in the form of the unique event.  Although already a success, he desperately wants to do something to make his mark, and he commits himself to the project despite the obvious risk involved.  The paper, which backs his proposal, is a daring, satirical publication:

"...a paper for the slightly unsavoury intellectual..." (p.23)

Tsugami himself is exactly the kind of man this description is aimed at...

Even though he's a clever fellow, he's out of his depth here.  Costs mount up and the people he deals with are far more cunning than he.  He has to deal with the slimy Tashiro, a wheeler-dealer if ever there was one, and businessman Okabe, a drunkard who offers help while using Tsugami's event for his own gain.  The excrement the bulls produce is far from being the only bullshit around here...

While focused on Tsugami though, Bullfight is also the story of post-war Japan.  Osaka is full of bombed buildings, but these are exciting times, and there are plenty of opportunities to make money if you know how - and have the nerve.  Life is beginning to return to normal, with baseball back in full swing and the New Year's bells ringing in Kyoto for the first time in years.  This bullfight is just another exciting venture to thrill the masses.

Over the course of the novel, Inoue slowly reveals Tsugami's character.  While he is initially calm, calculating and rational, a gambling streak swiftly rises to the surface.  What the reader sees is a man unable to hedge his bets, even when the chance arises (and he has several opportunities to walk away and cut his losses...).  He's simply not the kind of man to share the risks - for Tsugami, it's all or nothing...

The only one who sees this is his girlfriend Sakiko (Tsugami does have a wife and kids, but - in true Japanese fashion - they are safely elsewhere...).  Locked in a stagnant relationship for years, she wants to leave him but never quite can.  She alone knows the fever that burns inside him, and realises that this opportunity is what he's been waiting for all this time:

"They sat for a long time, saying nothing.  It was a peculiarly quiet moment, unlike any Sakiko had experienced in all the years she and Tsugami had been together.  The face of this man, liberated now from his work, as if some possessing spirit had lost its hold on him, looked oddly plain and docile.  Oh, look at him - that helpless face, she thought.  And suddenly, like water spreading through her, she felt something that was neither love nor hatred, but a sense of how truly lost he would be without her.  It was a pure feeling, far removed from desire.  Again and again, endlessly, the bells rang." (pp.51/2)

Sakiko realises that the bullfight is a make-or-break event, for both of them.  But which will it be?

Bullfight is a wonderful story, a very readable tale with a serious moral beneath the surface.  On one level, it's a cautionary tale of one man's tragic flaw, but on another it takes a look at the state of the nation, one which some think is on the up, but others would argue is on a steep moral decline.  The decision to have the book retranslated by Emmerich is a good one - it's a very smooth translation, making the novella even more enjoyable to read.  Entertaining, with a typically-Japanese open ending, reading Inoue's book is simply a great way to spend a couple of hours - and that's no bull ;)

'The Swimmers' by Joaquín Pérez Azaústre (Review)

Frisch & Co. is a new publisher specialising in translated fiction, with all their titles appearing in digital form only.  I didn't have much luck with the first book I tried, but from the start, today's choice was the one I really had my eye on.  Reviews compare the book with works by Haruki Murakami, David Lynch and Paul Auster - and while those comparisons are fairly apt, this writer has a style all of his own...

*****
Joaquín Pérez Azaústre's The Swimmers (translated by Lucas Lyndes, e-copy courtesy of the publisher) is a novel in fifty short chapters, mirroring the fifty 50-metre lengths the protagonist swims three times a week.  Jonás, our water-loving friend, is a photographer who, after breaking up with his long-time girlfriend, takes a step back from his career, instead taking pictures for newspapers.

Recently, his time has been spent drinking, working part-time and swimming with his best friend, Sergio, and he has been content to let the world slide by at its own pace as he gets on with his life, one length of the pool at a time.  However, when his father informs him that his mother has disappeared, uncontactable for a couple of months, Jonás realises that something is very wrong.  You see, his mother is not the first person to go missing - and she won't be the last...

The Swimmers is an excellent novel, and the comparisons above are (to me, at least) fairly apt.  In Jonás, we have a very Murakamiesque protagonist, and the slow, measured build-up, with the action implied rather than confronting, builds the tension nicely.  The pivotal scene of the book towards the end is comparable to what Murakami does in both The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore - as is the ambiguous ending.

Jonás is a loner, who is simply not adapting to life in his new flat without his partner.  He's begun to retreat from his commitments, almost living just for his swimming and his lunches with Sergio:

"...because his whole life is strapped to his back and right this instant it takes up no more space than that backpack, he could go practically anywhere, he wouldn't be leaving anything that important behind, in truth there's nothing waiting for him, just that fifty-meter stretch across the water."
(Frisch & Co., 2013)

The one thing that allows him to feel in control of his life is the beautiful rhythm of swimming long distances.

The book can be seen as a subtle criticism of society, one where people no longer make the time to see each other.  As Jonás says to his father:

"And don't go obsessing over this thing with Mom.  There are thousands of families in this city who don't see each other on a regular basis, friends who lose track of one another, and that doesn't mean anyone's vanished into thin air all of a sudden.  I've had friends where if I fall out of touch or lose their cell phone number, if they move to a new place or change their email address, I've got no way to find them."

Tired, permanently stressed, he (like many of us) has no time for family and friends.  Modern life, well, it's rubbish...

While I talked about the Murakami feel of the book above, another novel that came to mind while reading The Swimmers was Saramago's Blindness, not so much because of the style but for the connection between the central ideas.  Like Saramago's contagious blindness, Perez Azaústre's mysterious disappearances seem to impose a bizarre new problem on a fairly normal society, with people gradually becoming more and more frightened as they lose contact with their loved ones.  As in Blindness, it doesn't take long everyone to start to panic.
 
However, it's also possible that the disappearances are merely an allegory - perhaps it's Jonás who's taking a step back from life.  The ever emptier streets and the uncrowded trains might just be a symptom of his problems, representing his gradual withdrawal.  The shadows he sees at the swimming pool, vague outlines lurking behind the large plate-glass windows, might represent the people he's left behind, or lost along the way.  Jonás is certainly nostalgic about his childhood and his lost love - perhaps The Swimmers is a reflection on the loss of contact modern life brings.

The style of the novel is beautiful with long, elegant, sentences mirroring the powerful, driving strokes of Jonás the swimmer (it's no coincidence that there are fifty chapters...).  The writer uses themes of water, light, shadow, heat and coolness to... well, I'm not quite sure, but I'm sure they're there for a reason ;)  The mentions of water are particularly frequent, as you would expect, and there seems to be a connection between the pool, the abandoned water park and the canvas Jonás' mother was working on, one that eventually makes sense.  Even so, it's hard to get your head around everything on a first read - it's a book which deserves to be reread.

I had a quick look around, but I couldn't find any other example of the writer's work in English, which is a surprise.  I loved this book, and it's the kind of novel that many other readers would love too.  Kudos to Frisch & Co., and Lucas Lyndes, on bringing Perez Azaústre's work into English; hopefully, they'll team up again in the future to publish more of his books.

And while we're speaking about the translator, there's a great little piece on the publisher's web-site, in which he discusses the process of translating The Swimmers, with particular mention of style and sentence length.  Anyone interested should definitely take a look :)