As you may have noticed, I'm always keen to try translated fiction from new sources, and today's review is of a book from a previously untried publisher. Istros Books specialises in works from South-East Europe, especially the Balkans, and my first taste of their work comes from Croatia. At first glance, it's a typical love story, a novel describing how two people find each other. However, it doesn't quite end that way...
*****
Marinko Koščec's A Handful of Sand (translated by Will Firth, e-copy from publisher) is a novel written in two alternating monologues. One is from the perspective of a man while the other tells a story from a woman's point of view. While there are no names to give you any clues, the sections are handily printed in different fonts. The man lives in Canada, the woman in Zagreb, but we sense from the start that there must be a connection between them - one we'll have to wait for.
Through these rambling monologues, we gradually learn about their lives. The two are of a similar age and grew up in a country which exploded into pieces, leaving them resident in the new (old) country of Croatia. Both have difficulties to overcome, involving a missing parent, finding love and working out what it is they want to do with their lives. Then they meet...
A Handful of Sand is an intriguing 'he says, she says' story about a relationship decades in the making, but one which may not last much beyond the initial spark. It also provides a brief insight into the last few decades of Croatian history, but don't worry - this is not another war novel. The conflict is distant, and the mentions of it are fleeting. For the writer, his characters' personal growth is far more important.
Nevertheless, it is far from being a sunny, happy book. Both of our narrators struggle through their youth, with the man in particular obsessed from an early age with the darker side of life. He describes how a friend used to talk about death:
"He could discuss death endlessly. These were actually dialogues with himself, because I had nothing to say on the topic. Death is something certain and eternal, everywhere and at all times; it's damn hard to forget that but even today I don't have anything to add. Maybe he came to me with his endless monologues because no one else took him seriously; but how can you dismiss someone when they show so much passion, when they only seem really alive when talking about death?"
p.23 (Istros Books, 2013)
He may claim that he has little to say on the subject, but it's one which is never far from the surface.
The woman is an artist (we later learn that she's become a fairly successful one too), but her life has had its own ups and downs. From the death of her mother to her struggle to gain acceptance for her work, she tries to balance her desires with the needs of her possibly crippled, possibly hypochondriac, father. She's also looking for someone to share her life, but she just can't find the right person...
Of course, from the start, the whole book is heading towards the inevitable meeting:
"You were standing next to one of the originals effectively hung on the walls, with your arms folded, supporting your chin in the palm of your hand, and with a cigarette between your fingers. All at once I was standing on a narrow sliver of ground, everything else fell into an indefinite, mute whiteness, except for that figure, seemingly just a few steps away, which stepped forth from a gracious heavenly hand and switched off the world around her." (p.168)
The two fall headlong into a passionate affair, one with sizzling chemistry. This is no fairy tale, though - the story doesn't stop at that point and make claims for happily-ever-after. The real story is what happens afterwards, a look at the consequences when two damaged people collide...
There's a lot of good writing in A Handful of Sand, and there is also some very funny, dark humour in parts. The man is a literary editor, and his description of the chaotic life of a Zagreb publisher is both insightful and amusing (the anecdote about the doomed visit of an alcoholic Finnish writer is a highlight here). The woman also has her moments, at one point making a living by pumping out bulk Mediterranean landscapes for ignorant tourists. However, on the whole, it's a dark and foreboding novel, and the last fifty pages proves those premonitions correct. The final part of the book is compelling, disturbing and slightly surreal. Even after going back and having a second look, I'm not completely sure exactly what happened - or whether it actually took place at all...
If I were to criticise the book, I'd probably say that it was a little slow at the start. It takes a long time to get to the meeting, and as we're pretty sure it's coming, the time drags a little. Also, as well as being unsettling and confusing, some scenes towards the end of the book are actually a little upsetting - consider yourself warned ;)
Overall, though, A Handful of Sand is an interesting story of how a relationship is seen differently through two sets of eyes. The moral, if there is one, is that of making time count, with several images throughout the novel of sand slipping through fingers. When you find the right person, you need to act fast - every grain counts...
We're back to WW2 fare today, this time along Italy's Adriatic Coast. However, the book we'll be examining looks at things from a slightly different angle from usual. So, where are we exactly? Well...
*****
Trieste by Daša Drndić (translated by Ellen Elias Bursać - review copy from MacLehose Press)
What's it all about?
In 2006, Haya Tedeschi, an elderly lady, sits at home in Gorizia, near Trieste, surrounded by piles of papers and newspaper clippings. The mounds of paper scattered on the floor all have to do with the events of the war, stories of atrocities and biographies of some of the heroes and villains of the era. It may seem to be history to many people, but for Haya the war is still very real.
We then move back in time to the start of the twentieth century and are introduced to the Tedeschi family and the region around Trieste. It is a European crossroads, a city on the borders of Empires, a multilingual cultural melting pot - great for music and literature, very bad when the great European powers decide to go to war...
The writer takes us carefully through the first part of the 20th century until we reach the main focus of the novel, the Second World War. It is here that Haya meets SS officer Kurt Frank and has a secret affair. The result of the relationship is a son, Antonio Tedeschi - a boy who one day goes missing, leaving his mother with a sixty-two year wait for his return.
Trieste is a heavy book on a weighty subject. Drndić uses the novel to discuss what happened during the war in and around the title city, an area many people would know little about. We learn about the death camps in the region and the men who ran them (and what happened to them after the war...). We read about the post-war trials and how some of them were conducted in the absence of the accused, empty procedures which had no consequences. In short, we are reminded of the past, a past which the writer wants to make sure is not forgotten.
Eventually, the focus shifts to the Lebensborn project, a Nazi plan to ensure the dominance of their Aryan super race. Homes were opened all over the German Reich, where suitable women gave birth to children who were then to be brought up in a manner deemed fit for the heirs of the master race. When Himmler realised that the numbers weren't impressive enough, he decided to order the removal of suitable children born to inferior races in the region (including little Antonio Tedeschi...).
The final section of the book is devoted to Hans Traube, a man who knows that his name and upbringing is a lie, and his quest to uncover the truth. Like his birth mother, Hans has been searching through documents in the vain hope of finding his true identity, in the process finding out much more about his possible biological father than he would like to know. The Lebensborn children are doomed to live with uncertainty, hoping they might some day uncover their true origins, but also scared of what they might find:
"Then,
when I least expected it, the Past jumped out at me in a flash, Hop!
like a carcass, like some rotten corpse it draped itself around my neck,
plunged its claws into my artery and it still isn't letting go. I'd
like to shake it off, this Past, but it won't let me, it swings on me as
I walk, it lies on me while I sleep, it looks me in the eye and leers, See, I'm still with you."
p.339 (MacLehose Press, 2013)
Of course, it's not just the Lebensborn children who have to worry about the burden of the past. Drndić contrasts their fate with that of the children of the SS officers, the men and women responsible for crimes against humanity. They also struggle to live with the legacy of the past...
Trieste is minutely researched, comprising a dizzying collage of fact and fiction, stories and interviews. In its inclusion of photographs and original documentation (and even forty pages of the names of Italian holocaust victims), with a narrative frequently shoved aside in favour of a tangent, there is something almost Sebaldian in its structure. We are taken on a tour of WW2, from Aushwitz and Treblinka to Reinhard Heydrich at the Salon Kitty brothel in Berlin (for the second time in a week...), with anecdotes about concentration camp guards shooting prisoners for fun, and convoys of the doomed through Switzerland, where locals think they are helping by providing blankets and warm soup...
What comes through very clearly though is the mass slaughter, the senseless, deliberate waste of human life on a grand scale. One of the more interesting features of the novel is the occasional Q & A with both holocaust victims and their captors, giving insights into what happened - and how. As one guard says:
"When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil, my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle grazing in the pens trotted up to the fence and stared at our train. They were very close to my window, one jostling the other, looking at me through that fence. I thought then, This reminds me of Poland. That's how the people looked at me there: trustingly, just before they went into the... I couldn't eat tinned meat for a long time after that. Those big cows' eyes staring at me, those animals who had no idea that in no time they'd all be slaughtered...
So you didn't feel the camp inmates were people?
Cargo. They were cargo." (p.206)
Trieste is certainly an ambitious, expansive work, but if I had a criticism to make, it would be that it is a little over-ambitious at times. The main story, what little of it there is, is frequently pushed into the background, seemingly only there to serve as an excuse to write about the history. As with HHhH, the reader is left wondering what the actual focus of the work is, and whether it might have been better left as non-fiction...
Do you think it deserves to make the shortlist?
Possibly not. It's a worthy book on an important subject, but it wanders a little (OK, a lot), and I was never quite sure what the focus was meant to be. The last section, centred on Hans Traube and his search for the truth, is excellent, and I would personally have preferred a much narrower focus on the Lebensborn project.
Will it make the shortlist?
Despite what I said above, I think it has a good chance. I don't think I'm the best judge of literature dealing with the Holocaust, and other readers seem to appreciate books like HHhH and Trieste a lot more than I do. I suspect that one of those two will make the cut, and this one is much weightier and better written.
*****
Moving on, and we're (finally) lightening the mood a little; it's time to head off to Paris for some drinking, dancing and writing in the park. Whatever you do, make sure you dress for the occasion - suit up, everyone ;)
