The last few months on the blog have been taken up with two major projects, shadowing the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and plunging into the world of translated Korean fiction (and two very good projects they are too). However, when you devote so much time to particular areas, it's inevitable that something will fall through the cracks, and today's book is one I really meant to get to a good while back - even before it got longlisted (then shortlisted) for the Best Translated Book Award. Still, better late than never...
*****
Arnon Grunberg's Tirza (translated by Sam Garrett, e-copy courtesy of Open Letter Books) is a fascinating novel, a story of a man's disintegration in the face of events he is unable to control. The man in question, Jörgen Hofmeester, is a Dutch editor who has been put out to pasture by his employers. He still receives his pay, but he no longer actually has to go to work, a state of affairs which has thrown his world out of balance.
That's not the only change he has to cope with. His wife, who walked out on him three years earlier, recently turned up on his doorstep and has walked back into his life as if little has happened in the meantime. While Jörgen is struggling to adapt to her return, another impending change is causing him even more angst. His beloved eighteen-year-old daughter, Tirza, having just graduated from high school, is planning to travel around Africa for a few months with her latest boyfriend. Jörgen decides to throw a party for her before she leaves, but it's at this party that all of his problems finally catch up with him...
Tirza is a novel about a man whose life is slowly falling apart, and what happens at his daughter's party is partly the result of past events, and partly the catalyst for what's to come:
"Tirza has thrown parties before, but tonight is different. Like lives, parties can be a failure or a success. Tirza hasn't said it in so many words, but Hofmeester senses that a great deal depends on this evening. Tirza, his youngest daughter, the one who turned out best. Turned out wonderfully, both inside and out."
p.8 (Open Letter Books, 2013)
The comment is rather prescient. A lot will happen during the party, not all of it for the good - the course of the future is set here...
While the novel is named after the daughter, it's the father who is at the centre of everything, a man in the midst of great change. Hofmeester is a man who lives life by the book, and these life-altering events, particularly the return of his runaway wife, cast him adrift on a sea of uncertainty:
"He didn't understand the reason for this visit, and Hofmeester was a person who wanted to understand things. He detested the irrational, the way other people detest vermin." (p.15)
Add to this the disappearance of his retirement money, swallowed up by post-9/11 stock-market fluctuations, and you can see that Hofmeester isn't exactly in a good place.
The reader is initially sympathetic towards Jörgen, feeling pity for the confused, abandoned husband. However, it soon becomes clear that he's really not that nice at all. He's violent towards his wife, a dictator with his children and penny-pinching (to the point of fraud) with the tenants in the flat upstairs. The key to understanding Grunberg's book is solving the puzzle he has set for the reader as to what kind of a person his main character actually is.
His experiences with sex provide an interesting window into his psyche. The relationship with his wife is certainly unusual, based on a mutual loathing and violent 'games', and he looks for satisfaction elsewhere, including with his cleaner. His attraction to the forbidden, especially what he sees as 'dirty' women, will confront him at the party, in the form of one of Tirza's classmates. And as for his rather close relationship with his younger daughter...
What Grunberg does well here, though, is create a much more rounded figure than the above would suggest - Jörgen's's by no means a complete monster. While his wife (justifiably) complains about Hofmeester's lack of understanding, she is a piece of work herself - a flirt, an absent mother, an artist for whom domestic duties simply don't exist. This leaves Jörgen trying to raise two daughters he doesn't really understand, a clueless father struggling in unfamiliar waters (anyone who thinks reading Tolstoy to a teenage daughter will help with emotional issues really is lost). These human touches help to make him a complete character and allow the reader to empathise - at times.
The real beauty of the book is the way in which Grunberg constructs his scenes, putting two people together in a seemingly-normal conversation, one which turns uncomfortable and just won't end, no matter how much we'd like it to. The writer simply won't let the reader go, forcing them to read on, squirming in their seat, and the novel is packed with these lengthy, gripping, horrible scenes. If it's painful to watch, imagine what it must be like for the characters.
Tirza is very skilfully written, with an excellent translation which captures the feeling of subtle horror nicely. Throughout the book, there are scattered hints of what's to come, with clever parallels and echoes of future events. One obvious one was:
"The remains of his life stretch out before him like a desert." (p.79)
Knowing that Hofmeester will be heading off to Africa at some point lends this chance comment extra significance... However, it's the little mentions of racism, money, violence and Hofmeester's lovelife which are more intriguing as Grunberg casually places clues as to how things might (or might not) play out.
In short, Tirza is a wonderful book about a very strange man, not a figure you'd like to have in your family. One book it shares features with is Birgit Vanderbeke's The Mussel Feast, with its focus on a tyrannical father figure. However, Grunberg's novel is a much longer, more in-depth examination of the pater familias, placing him at the centre of the novel, rather than in the wings. Strangely enough, though, despite his prominence in the book, Jörgen Hofmeester actually prefers to stay away from the limelight, even at his own parties:
"Hofmeester is standing in the middle of the room with the platter in his hand. He feels invisible. Not an unpleasant feeling. He's there without being there. The man no one notices, that's what you might call him. And oddly enough, he is proud of that." (p.217)
It's always the quiet ones you have to be careful of...
Today's post features a review of another work of translated fiction from Open Letter (a publisher based at the University of Rochester, which is also behind the renowned Three Percent blog). The writer is a fairly new name in translated fiction - and (excitingly) it's another new country for me...
*****
Inga Ābele's High Tide (translated by Kaija Straumanis, e-copy courtesy of the publisher) is the story of Ieva, a single mother in the Latvian capital of Riga who is approaching middle age. She's a script-writer, one not in the best of spirits, and she has been deeply affected by the recent death of her grandmother. However, there's more to her story, much more - this will become clearer as we progress...
...or, more accurately expressed, regress...
The writer (as you might expect) takes the reader on a journey through Ieva's life, but backwards. As we meet the important people in her life - her gran, her mum and dad, her brother, Pāvils, and her daughter, Monta - things begin to take shape. The story always returns to two other people though - her dead lover, Aksels, and her ex-husband Andrejs - two men forever linked by one woman and a fateful event.
Ābele's novel looks at how life rarely unfolds the way we expect it to, even if it usually offers you things you never thought possible. Is it worth it though? Well:
"Like an Indian who gets glass beads in exchange for gold, you trade the suffering of existence in return for the smell of baking bread. The feel of a dog's wet nose against your hand. The look in your children's eyes. A bird feeder. May it all bring you joy, says this opposing, unwanted, huge opportunity - Life."
p.8 (Open Letter, 2013)
I suppose though that life is what you make of it...
Ieva starts the novel jaded, cynical and world-weary, and the backwards path through her life allows the reader to see why she ended up where she did, with the reader seeing the results before the causes. This can be confusing at times, as when
Ieva returns to the prison to visit Andrejs time and time again, a little like a moth to the flame. It takes us a long time to realise exactly why she does this...
Once you have an overview of the whole novel, it can be seen as a work (and life) in three parts, with Ieva's life changed by two pivotal events: Aksel's death and her final rejection of Andrejs. Ieva passes from young love and freedom, through a miserable existence chained to a jailbird, followed by a life as an artist - although the novel's structure turns that order on its head. Are you still with me?
The strained relationships the main character has, both with the two men in her life and her parents, has a wearing-down effect on Ieva and causes a rift in her relationship with her daughter, Monta. In fact, some of the more interesting parts of the book are when we see Ieva through the eyes of the other characters. She's a middle-aged woman sleeping around, working her way through... what exactly? Grief? Trauma? Depression?
Of course, Ieva isn't the only one struggling - it's a bleak life, and it's hard to be happy, so you snatch moments when and where you can. Aksel seems to realise this best, letting go of his anger and trying to appreciate life outside prison, his returned, if monotonous, freedom:
"It's his, Andrejs's moment. A moment of existence. He's gotten so good at capturing these moments over the past years. He sniffs them out like a bloodhound, extracts them like a pearl diver and brings them to the surface of his consciousness, breaks and grinds them down like a nutcracker. He's almost happy, dammit - happy!" (p.54)
The three main characters have their own ideas on how to be happy though. While Aksel prefers to go his own way, lost in punk music and drugs, Ieva escapes into a fantasy world of words. For Andrejs, whose escape lies in hard work on the land, this choice of paper over trees is a suspicious one:
"Independence and betrayal. The entire breed of book readers are traitors. Because they use words however they see fit, and they're as sly as foxes. They'll forever twist the world into something they like better. Everyone else sees black, but they say it's just the opposite of white. Obviously you can say it like that too, but it will always be connected to a selfish purpose so tangled it's sickening." (p.64)
Yep - never trust a reader ;)
High Tide is beautifully written in parts, and the writer often plays with the imagery of tides, high and low, usually metaphorically. In seizing opportunities when they come, the characters are battling through the tough, low-tide times, waiting for the tide to turn in their favour. There's also a tide-like contrast in the structure between frequent short sections, extended conversations and the few, pivotal, lengthy prose sections. These long quasi-monologues (for example, a section at the start of the novel with Ieva and Andrejs at the flat) are long, pensive and elegantly written, and are probably the parts I enjoyed the most.
However, not all the writing is as good as in those long sections; some of the shorter parts were a little clumsy, especially in conversations. Also, once the reader knows the full story, the book peters out a little, and the last few chapters didn't really do much for me. A life told backwards is a nice idea (c.f. Hitomi Kanehara's Autofiction), but High Tide ends with a whimper more than a bang really...
I'm not sure it all comes together in the end, but Ābele does create some excellent scenes, and High Tide is definitely an interesting read. In part, some of my misgivings might come from the e-format I was using, which is not ideal for this book - it would have been nice to flick back and forth to refresh my memory (not as easy as I'd like on my antiquated Kindle...). Despite coming form the digital age, I think High Tide is a book which might best be enjoyed on paper :)
Anyone who reads Russian literature in English will have noticed that there is, shall we say, a slight obsession with the classics. For every new translation, there are a couple of dozen updated versions of novels from the Golden and Silver ages of the country's literary past. However, there is good new stuff out there too: I enjoyed Oleg Zaionchkovsky's Happiness is Possible when I read it last year, and today's offering is another contemporary book which came with a lot of hype. Let's see if it lived up to it...
*****
Mikhail Shishkin's Maidenhair (translated by Marian Schwartz, review copy courtesy of Open Letter Books) has been touted as an instant classic. The five-hundred page novel starts off in Switzerland as a story about an interpreter for Russian refugees, a man who must listen to the stories of atrocities they spin in an attempt to prolong their stay in the country.
Very soon though any idea of a straight narrative is abandoned. Shishkin creates a tangle of intermingled strands, zipping backwards and forwards in time and space, alternating between fiction and reality (whatever that is). As well as following the unnamed interpreter in his work (and on his travels), the reader must navigate the books the interpreter is reading, the postcards he writes (but never sends) to his son, and the diary entries of a famous singer and actress whose biography he was once commissioned to write.
It is an overwhelming confusion of genres, styles and stories, the parts coming together to create a whole which is extremely difficult to understand fully, but wonderful to read. A book which came to mind while reading Maidenhair was Cloud Atlas, another ambitious novel which plays with genres, meta-fiction and text types. Shishkin, obviously, is indebted to his Russian influences, and mentions of Gogol, Pushkin, Turgenev and Tolstoy are scattered across the pages of the novel. However, there is a lot here that is Joycean too, with drifting stream-of-consciousness passages bumping shoulders with black humour and language straight from the gutter. Hmm - I'm not sure I'm making myself very clear here...
At the risk of falling into the trap of comparing my current book with another recent read, Maidenhair again seems to be a novel which attempts to discuss just about everything. It is a work about war and peace, about love and (above all) about stories. One of the main ideas seems to be whether it is possible to be happy while others suffer, whether we can smile and dance while others are slaughtered in unnecessary wars:
"It's like with happiness. Since everyone can't be happy anyway, whoever can be happy right now, should. You have to be happy today, right now, no matter what. Someone said there can't be a heaven if there's a hell. Supposedly it's impossible to be in heaven if you know suffering exists somewhere. Nonsense. True enjoyment of life can only be felt if you've known suffering. What would the leftovers of our soup be to this mongrel if it hadn't had a whiff of hunger?"
p.474 (2012, Open Letter Books)
The privileged, comfortable reader may well feel a few pangs of guilt at being able to settle back in a soft reading chair while Chechens flee the Russian army - the quotation above shows that not everyone feels the need to worry about justice and fairness...
Another focus is Shishkin's proposal that life is lived in four dimensions. Everywhere we go, we leave traces of ourselves, meaning that we are everywhere we have ever been (or will ever be). This means too that the ghosts of yesterday are still here today, all the people we have ever known existing at the same time and in the same space. In fact, some of these people and things are merely copies of earlier beings - life is full of imitations of imitations with no original. As we see from the statues the interpreter visits in Rome, or the actress Bellochka's constant stream of boyfriends (each one seeming to be 'the one'), everything repeats, nothing is new...
...at least I think that is what he is getting at. With all the constant jumping around between realities, it can be hard to keep tabs on what is actually being said. Not that this is necessarily a problem. Even if all our lives are inextricably interconnected, there is no need to get to grips with every single thread:
"You just have to understand destiny's language and its cooing. We're blind from birth. We don't see anything and don't pick up on the connection between events, the oneness of things, like a mole digging its tunnel and bumping into thick roots, and for the mole these are just insurmountable obstacles and he can't imagine the crown these roots nourish." p.268
Moles, yep, we are all moles. Let's move on.
As you may have gathered from the ramblings above, Maidenhair is not exactly a comfort read. In fact, it is a book which makes the reader work hard for their enjoyment on many levels, whether that involves keeping track of who is narrating which section or having to flick to Wikipedia to look up historical, literary and mythological figures name-checked in the novel. If that all seems like too much hard work though, you can just appreciate it as a set of interconnected stories and enjoy the language (and with Marian Schwartz's excellent translation, that makes for very good reading indeed). In the end, it is all about the stories...
Many reviews of Maidenhair have been rather effusive, and the 'instant classic' tag has been thrown around a fair bit. On a first read, I'm not sure I can make a judgement like that, but it is a very good book, and one which I'm convinced will be just as successful in its translated form as it was in the original. One thing is for sure - it is a novel which will stand up to rereading, and one which will reward the reader who is prepared to put in the time and effort. If that sounds like you...
A while back, Stu from Winstonsdad's Blog was lucky enough to have a Q & A with Sjón, the Icelandic writer whose book (From the Mouth of the Whale) we chose as our Shadow IFFP winner. Among the many gems uncovered were Sjón's recommendations for further reading in Icelandic literature - namely Halldór Laxness' The Fish Can Sing, and Kristín Ómarsdóttir's Children in Reindeer Woods. I read one of Laxness' books a few weeks back, and as luck would have it, I had also just received a review copy of Ómarsdóttir's novel from Open Letter Books. Consider this a post with the Sjón seal of approval ;)
*****
Children in Reindeer Woods (translated by Lytton Smith) is a slightly bizarre book with a highly explosive start. On a nice sunny day, somewhere in the country, a trio of soldiers walk up to a house. The inhabitants come out to greet them, smiling happily... then, one by one, they are gunned down. The three soldiers go into the house, but only one walks out alive - and the only other person to escape the carnage is an eleven-year-old girl called Billie...
Alone on the farm,
Billie and Rafael, the surviving soldier, attempt to draw up some kind of boundaries, rules for
establishing a fragile coexistence. Their relationship is a forced,
somewhat strained one, with neither quite sure what the other is
actually doing there, both settling for a temporary life which excludes
the outside world. As the summer goes by, the two begin to enjoy each other's company in their blissfully bucolic existence. If only all these people didn't keep dropping in
uninvited...
If the start is confusing, don't expect the rest of the book to provide many answers. The writer appears to have deliberately set out to create a novel in which very little can be recognised or taken for granted. We are told that there is a war, but we have no idea who is fighting. We know that we are in the middle of nowhere (later we find out that it it is 1100 kilometres to the nearest city), but where exactly this nowhere lies is less certain. The lack of ideas to hold onto makes reading Children in Reindeer Woods extremely disorientating.
When Billie and Rafael venture out of the house, this feeling intensifies. The two drive out over Ceaseless Heath, down through the Endless Pass and look out over Forever Valley. Reindeer Woods appears to be located within a bubble in space and time (or in a Beckett play...), and this sense of placelessness gives the whole book, and every action in it, a sense of unreality.
Even the names of the characters don't really give us much to go on. Billie, Rafael, Soffia, Abraham, Marius... It's as if Ómarsdóttir has deliberately chosen a collection of unrelated foreign names to further obscure the true location of her story. And while we know that Rafael is a soldier, it's unclear whether he's still in the army, or if he has decided to run away from the (invisible) war. As for Billie, for most of the book, we have no real idea why or how she ended up in the house. I don't think we're in Iceland any more, Toto...
Another way in which Ómarsdóttir creates her web of confusion is the language her characters use. Billie's strange mix of over-formal expressions and slang can be explained by her age and the unfamiliar circumstances, but Rafael's speech is just as unsettling. In his conversations with one of the visitors, the language constantly swings between registers, changing from friendly, to formal, to suspicious in a heartbeat. The result is that we are constantly on eggshells, never quite certain that bloodshed, or something just as ominous, isn't just around the corner...
So what's it all about, you say? The impressionability of youth? The confusion of war? Your guess is as good as mine. Children in Reindeer Woods is an absorbing book, one which is more disturbing than entertaining, in the sense that the reader can never settle down with the feeling that this is what the author is getting at. It's a book which requires (demands) rereading - whether it will give up its secrets on a second attempt is questionable though...
One quotation, however, might give a clue as to what Ómarsdóttir is trying to say:
"In war, the murders committed by the victors are unimpeachable - the same way as the insane are not held responsible for their crimes." p.128 (Open Letter Books, 2012)
In a story where many, many, mad, bad things happen, the reader is asked to decide who is responsible and how far we can blame them for their crimes. While, none of the people we meet in Reindeer Woods could be described as completely sane, perhaps we need to ask ourselves who, exactly, is mad here?
No, it makes no sense to me either ;)
