PREFACE, PREFACE, PREFACE to ASTRIDE

PREFACE TO THE Preface:

Yesterday during lunch with Jon Rabinowitz, founder of Turtle Point Press, he mentioned he was  reading Peter Taylor.  I suggested he might be interested in George Garrett’s DOUBLE VISION  as it concerns itself with Peter Taylor who in both imagination and in reality had been a next door neighbor of both the real and the fictionalized George Garrett.  It was last of Garrett’s novels to be published and was not reviewed in the New York Times or in many other places… it is one of his very best and easily joins THE DEATH OF THE FOX, POISON PEN and the short story Wreath for Garibaldi. 

I was introduced to Garrett by Chad Walsh in 1969  who suggested I go to Hollins College as George was there and in turn Garrett welcomed me into the MA program and sent me a year later via a phone call to Frank MacShane at the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia… Garrett made it financially possible for me to come to the University of Tennessee celebration of his life and work, well knowing as he told me that it was all a trial run for their hopes to bring Cormac McCarthy to that place… and so while they promised to publish a book commemorating this event of course that never came to fruition as the Garrett festival failed in its true intention to lure McCarthy there… something Garrett knew would be the result but to enjoy seeing and hearing all those who had been part of his life… and while I didn’t see him much in the following years I did talk with him just before his death when I was up in Massachusetts visiting my son, a student at the Groton School, and opening the pages of DOUBLE VISION  I know that on page 153:  “Frank also copies down one sentence from a piece, “The Writing Life,” by Thomas McGonigle: The dead are always with us.

  It is available here: http://ndreview.nd.edu/assets/155075/a_writing_life.pdf.

                  And while I have published two books and a third on the way from Notre Dame…this quotation and being quoted in Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek stake a miniscule and probably laughable point of culpable pride.

                                    PREFACE

ONE  from the 25 March, 2016 TLS:  Geoffrey Hill writes, “In our present condition of oligarchic democracy…”  

TWO   In the WSJ for 1 April, 2016 it is stated that 95% of college professors in the humanities are self-identified as left of center.

There you have the US and the UK in 2016.  

Preface Two:

BE WARNED  I HAVE NOT QUOTED FROM THE BOOKS I AM WRITING ABOUT.  I AM A LOUSY TYPIST AND JUST CAN’T AT THE MOMENT FIND THE ENERGY TO TYPE…

Books I am reading and books I think everyone should read or at least look into:

SEVEN SEVEN….. THE HATRED OF MUSIC  by Pascal Quiginard.  (Yale University Press.)   A book of fragments, reflections… the huge mistake of listening to music, all music, from a man who was a classical musician, who organized a major festival of baroque opera… a life long listener who stops…  understanding we are surrounded by noise from the time in the womb, noise we have no control over… he has a very disturbing reflection on the use of music in the Nazi murder camps where the murders were carried out to a soundtrack of the very best of classical music…

Quiginard joins at least in my mind Robert Calasso and E.M. Cioran as being the three essential thinkers of the current moment.  They are the only individuals who seem to be able to think, to be suggestive, to warn, to be clearing a way for thinking to continue.  Tied to no dreary political party, no theory, to agenda… with an absence of jargon and access to all the major world languages : ancient and modern…

Survivors of the so-called Sixties remember::: :the beating to death of a Black man by the Hells Angels who were guarding a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont as the band played on…

::: remember Charlie Manson took direction from the Beatles’ White Album when he sent those people out to do some carving in the garbage dumps as he sang on an album called LIE… just another guy wanting to play music… right in there with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Doris Day’s son…

ah, the days of LSD and music…

EIGHT EIGHT…   I have been reading Thomas Wolfe again as I did so long ago when I read my first novel, his first novel LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL… a book I came to on my own, the only novel I had read before going to college… but this time YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN… as I have thought to describe a party I was recently to and remembered that Wolfe had a very memorable party scene in this his last novel.  What I had lost touch with was Wolfe’s ability to inhabit lives other than his own and his description of the rich remains as essential today as ever… and it is no wonder that Wolfe was one of the first American writers that both Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke turned to… something little known or appreciated as Wolfe’s books were forced to be forgotten by the creative writing industry in the US…

NINE NINE….I have also been reading  I the Supreme by August Roa Bastos.  The single best description of “a leader” and the immediate delusion that inhabits such a person.  Told in a startling original manner with no consistent timeless voice, no attempt at re-creation, no paying homage to the usual blandishments of suspense and plot.  A sole reliance on the exact moment each sentence is read in order to create the person of Franca… who becomes--- because of how carefully the centering of the book upon Franca---  every nasty leader along with usual bunch of the so-called good guys… to remember a leader is to always dip your fingers in the blood or another or the many…  in the same way that Joyce in Ulysses tries to describe a conversation between a father and son that in reality can never be, no matter how willing or how hopeful the parties might be… by sending Stephen and Leopold out to eventually meet… on the sure conveyor belt to  six feet under…

TEN TEN…I AM TRYING TO READ Laszlo Krasnahorkai, DESTRUCTION AND SORROW BENEATH THE HEAVENS.. . (Seagull Books) but it reminds me of SOUL MOUNTAIN by Gao Xingjian, the Chinese Nobel prize winner and which in turn reminded me that Jack Kerouac’s BIG SUR  or THE DHARMA BUMS which were both superior to Xingjian and I would suggest that the Chinese guy was trying to be Kerouac and while pretty good, fails--- at least for me—as I have been on that journey and to that place before with Jack Kerouac. 

ELEVEN ELEVEN…And sadly I was defeated by Klaus Hoffer’s AMONG THE BIERESCH (Seagull Books)  in which a young Austrian writer tries to imagine the life and culture of an obscure part of what was the old Austro-Hungarian empire…which seemed a not very interesting project though it is said to be popular in Germany… because in English we are fortunate to have a translation told very much from within the imagine setting that Hoffer is trying to urge into being…in the form of Gyula Illyes’s PEOPLE OF THE PUSZTA…first published in 1936 but available in English since 1967…

(an over-looked New Directions book, THE SINISTRA ZONE  by Adam Bodor  some years ago took us to one of these obscure border regions but some of us had read his THE EUPHRATES AT BABYLON…)

        

The only reason I knew about the Hoffer book is that it was translated by Isabel Fargo Cole whose essential translated version of “I” by Wolfgang Hilbig (SEAGULL BOOKS) and the book of stories THE SLEEP OF THE RIGHTEOUS also by Hilbig introduced me to finally a German language writer one could read after reading Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Ernst Junger, Uwe Johnson, Ingeborg Bachmann…to lay out some names for context… and Hilbig lead to re-reading his wife, Natascha Wodin whose THE INTERPRETER was published in English as long ago as 1983 to no reviews…and ONCE I LIVED         from Serpents Tale… also not widely reviewed but if I had the power I would link her to Jean Rhys… in her ability to present the interior of her women in such a manner that individualizes them though they are hardly the positive roll models women have been cajoled into providing and happily do all the way to the bank and irrelevance… How these two people could be together… not having the German I cant answer that.. as Hilbig in “I” has created the perfect example of  a man who is inside the security apparatus of the DDR…and really inside every other apparatus including the American versions  which have sadly been endlessly romanticized by American writers…

Lastly I should have written about ATLAS OF AN ANXIOUS MAN by Christoph Ranmayr (Seagull Books) as I had long ago reviewed his THE TERRORS OF ICE AND DARKNESS… but that review is not available as I wrote it for Newsday day when that was a very good newspaper for books… The ATLAS is a collection of 70 some destinations but I have not ventured into it but not from laziness instead sheer jealousy--- I guess they do things differently in Austria and German where a good writer—on the basis of  his novel THE TERRORS OF ICE AND DARKNESS and THE LAST WORLD--- gets paid to travel…

Such is a moment and then a PS.

THE RECENT DEATH OF A GREAT WRITER…  sometimes the Nobel gets it right as with Claude Simon and I guess we can be happy that Patrick Modiano  got it recently—better him than any of the awful American prospects, Roth Delillo, Oates..who else…

Book review: 'Fiasco' by Imre Kertész

The second book of the trilogy about a young boy who survives Nazi concentration camps.

June 14, 2011|By Thomas McGonigle | Special to the Los Angeles Times

THIS WAS ALL THE SPACE I WAS ALLOWED AND IT WAS STILL MUCH SHORTENED…

In 1944, a 14-year-old boy, future novelist Imre Kertész, was rounded up while on an excursion in the countryside near Budapest and sent to Auschwitz. And then to Buchenwald. Surviving the camps and returning to Budapest, he was asked, simply, by his surviving family and friends, "Where have you been?"

In his work, Kertész reflects on how quickly he discovered that no one really wanted to know what he had experienced. And yet, Kertész's entire literary life has been an attempt at answering that simple question in the trilogy of novels, "Fatelessness," "Fiasco" and "Kaddish for an Unborn Child" — an attempt that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. His other books describe in particular detail his dreary survival under the communism in Hungary.

Finally published in an English translation, "Fiasco" is actually the middle book of the trilogy and describes, in the opening third, the fictionalized experiences Kertész must have had in writing "Fatelessness" — having it rejected by a publisher as being unsuitable for publication. "As I now see clearly, to write a novel means to write for others — among others, for those who reject one," he muses. The later parts of "Fiasco" follow a writer very much like Kertész who is going about his life in the tediously circumscribed environment of communist Hungary.

         Although "Fiasco" is outwardly a little off-putting — in Kertész's style, the reader encounters parenthesis upon parenthesis — the writer also succinctly explains how he could write about his awful experiences as a child that he described in "Fatelessness" and still remain faithful to his 14-year-old self's search for adventure and beauty amid the horror of the concentration camps.

Now, in translator Tim Wilkinson's handling, "Fiasco" completes the trilogy for English readers, a trilogy that is one of the best renderings of what it must have been like to survive a Nazi murder camp. As Kertész writes in "Fiasco," he could not avoid a responsibility "to transmit, in my own way, according to my own lights; to transmit the material that was possible for me, my own material, myself.… however, there was one thing that, perhaps naturally enough, I did not think of: we are never capable of interpreting for ourselves. I was taken to Auschwitz not by the train in the novel but by a real one."

POST PREFACE

Probably this is all a self-indictment for… knowing, I am about to give birth astride a grave in Beckett’s phrase… but then every book is that.

SEAGULL BOOKS: The Best Publisher in English

         Seagull Books is now the publisher to go to for what is the best in world literature.  About the only other publisher of its authority is Robert Calasso’s Adelphi Editions in Italy.  Seagull’s seasonal catalogues are the first I look forward to. Of course there are other publishers, Archipelago, Open Letter, Dalkey Archive, New Directions and Two Lines  but for the breadth of their interests and the actual shape and feel of the books Seagull is in another class. 

         Of course one is curious about FSG but they seem to do fewer and fewer real books--- though in the immediate moment SUBMISSION by Michel Houellebecq and recently the ZIBALDONE by Leopardi as well as PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas--- mitigate that reservation to be sure but as far as I can tell at the moment there is nothing very much to expect of  poor Alfred Knopf at 100 years with a picture of the aged Sunny Mehta posing with another relic Patti Smith in the Wall Street Journal society page--- such is the fate…

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         Seagull Books originating in India is distributed by the University of Chicago Press---  they have German, Italian, French lists as well as books in many other fields beyond what I am mostly interested in, literature…  My shelves are filling with their books.  It is as if they have opened a delightful river of non traditional books dominated by the fragment and obsessive narrators, remembering suddenly Nicanor Parra saying to me sometime in the early 70s in  The Only Child  a bar on West 79^th Street NYC:  “to echo him: the I is always another.”  Parra did not have to mention Rimbaud and it is this sort of intelligence and understanding at work in the selecting of books and authors by Seagull and here I will list some--- and you can see by the list why--- Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Laszlo Kraznahorkai, Alexander Kluge, Pascal Quignard, Yves Bonnefoy, Hans Magus Enzenberger, Jorge Luis Borges, Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch… and in the mail yesterday: PAPER COLLAGE (Selected Aphorisms and Short Prose)  by Georges Perros, drawn from three books originally in French (1960-78) from Gallimard of this recluse’s thoughts…: at random:  It’s wrong to complain. If we knew where we came from, where we are and where we are going, it would be absolute hell.

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         Pascal Quignard is a re-discovery for me as I had read now too long ago THE SALON IN WURTTEMBERG (Published when Grove Press was owned by a Getty woman and George Weidenfeld) and ALL THE WORLD’S MORNINGS… those were relatively traditional novels as Quignard at least based on the five books that Seagull has published: THE ROVING SHADOWS, THE SILENT CROSSING, ABYSSES, SEX AND TERROR, THE SEXUAL NIGHT. 

         What I treasure in Quignard is his ability to reveal my absolute ignorance and illiteracy when I attempt to compare my own memory and learning of what is in reality world literature.  His books rely upon the suggestive fragment, brief prose passages sometimes connected, often times not, ranging across the whole of world literature with a wonderfully sensuous understanding of the ancient world and in this he can only be compared to Roberto Calasso in their shared understanding that the---  like Krapp I now slam the tape machine off so as to avoid revealing my own pathetic attempt to understand either of these writers.

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Of course Quignard is not much reviewed in the US---where if you are praised by the NY Times it is a form of abuse, such is the state of newspaper reviewing--- and the same went for Ingeborg Bachmann’s WAR DIARY written as an 18 rear old as WW2 comes to an end and her affair with a British soldier who turns out to be an exile Austrian Jewish guy who eventually leaves for what will be Israel… another text adding to our understanding of the only woman one really knows from the German language as it were… and there was Max Frisch’s DRAFTS FOR A THIRD SKETCHBOOK :  “what our American friends expect: a miracle!... they want to be feared and loved at the same time.  If we don’t manage that, they see it as anti-American”… to add to the long ago published notebooks from the 70s another writer who disappeared for the most part from America…

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Here are two passages from ABYSSES  by Quignard and allow them to stand in for all the books by all the authors I have both  listed and not listed as being published by Seagull Books:

Libraries and museums took over from churches and palaces.  Sacred places where all the members of a group began to worship, gathering in silence around something neither-found- nor-lost (the fascinus of Osiris).  Societies that were increasingly religious and mythologizing, adoring themselves in the reflection of their past.  Flocks of sheep, horned animals and dreams circulating endlessly around the empty, trans-temporal envelope 

In the great age of exploration, the whole of the known world become drenched in ecclesiastical Latin---a fact we might well find astonishing.  All the more astonishing, indeed, as Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek were all more likely to have been spoken in the houses of Yeshua than the tongue of the Romans, which was merely the persecutory language of the triumphal arches and crucifixion.

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          But I can not stop in the past--- if there is such a thing--- as Seagull has also published two books of conversations  with Jorge Luis Borges conducted by Osvaldo Ferrari in Borges 84^th year:  and the most startling in ways that seem obvious in our moment of typing and reading…  Ferrari mentions that the American landing on the moon was welcomed by Borges but the rest of the world seems to have quickly forgotten it….  This leads to a discussion that in recounting sounds pretentious  in our dumbed down times but to just list some of the proper names:  Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Eric the Red, Melville, Whitman, Berkeley, Plato, Seneca, Saint Brendan, Denis de Rougemont, Columbus…...  of course it is not… but Ferrari and Borges tease the landing out and finally Borges is asked why this great adventure is now not talked about, marveled over:  “No, one doesn’t talk about it because one talks about elections, one talks about the saddest subject of all which  is politics. It is not for the first time that I’m the enemy of the State and of States and of nationalism which is one of the blemishes of our time.  The fact that each person insists on the privilege of having been born in one or another point or corner of the planet, no?  And that we’re so far from the ancient dream of the Stoic, that time when people were defined by their city--- Thales of Miletus, Zeno of Elea, Heraclitus of Ephesus, etc, who would say that they were citizens of the world.  It would have been a scandalous paradox for the Greeks..

       Later there is an aside, “the moon of Virgil and the moon of Shakespeare were already before the discovery, no? … There’s something so intimate about the moon…There’s a line in Virgil which talks about ‘amica silentia lunae’, which refers to the brief period of darkness which allow the Greek to get down from the wooden horse and invade Troy.  But Wilde, who doubtless knew about this, prefers to talk about “the friendly silence of the moon’.  And in a line of my own, I’ve said:  “the silent friendliness of the moon/ I quote Virgil badly) accompanies you.’

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         That seems a good place to stop as you search out the Seagull books catalogue at University of Chicago Press.

         But come to think of it there is a better place—last week I read with my students in Freshman Composition 2 at BMCC  Peter Handke’s TILL DAY YOU DO PART OR A QUEST OF LIGHT (Seagull Books) in which a woman from what seems to be a Roman tombstone begins to speak and we realize it is the voice of the women mentioned in Krapp’s Last Tape… the only possible response to this great work of art where she takes issue with Krapp and what I have always enjoyed about the play when Krapp concludes:   “I can feel the fire in me now…”

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         And I could even go on to Ralf Rothmann or Patrick Roth or Annemarie Schwarzenbach--- whose life and literary works trace out the sexual frontiers that are coming to be taken for granted in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annemarie_Schwarzenbach… 

         Yet… it is a struggle to disbelieve that  it is now really all too late for such a publisher… I hope I am wrong since Seagull originating in India…maybe still has the ancient optimism from before KA---to echo Calasso...
AND A PS PS  when I went to fix some typos:  APOSTOLOFF  by Sibyl Lewitscharoff...caught my eyes across from where I am sitting--- a going to Bulgaria... and I have only scratched the surface!!!!

SOME REMAINS WORTH READING:: STILL

2===Within my brief interest the book sections of newspapers in the US have shrank, become nearly extinct, are barely holding on…while new  books continue to appear and will go un-noticed and while most book deserve to go un-noticed it is now to our slightly new gain that it is possible to share the appearance of some books both new and old that deserve to be read and held to one’s self… and even the Library of America which is well established has coming in the Fall two books and a collection of novels that deserve to be discussed or noted

3===I was thinking, as I held the latest in the collected Philip Roth,  that I was the man with nail and hammer moving about his casket at the last moment so with the 7^th… but I had to be honest:  Julien Gren had the honour of having the most in-print volumes in the Pleiade while still alive and while Roth will never be the equal of Green in the real  cosmopolitan world for too many reasons to go into…  but Roth is an honorable writer and there is a little unfairness to choosing him for this lavish attention and ignoring to date John Updike, Ernest Hemingway, and the famously missing poetry of Herman Melville, but better Roth than the announcement of the collected Toni Morrison or Don DeLillo…

4=== but the LOA has done a wonderful service  with a volume devoted to the writings of AMBROSE BIERCE including his essential Devil’s Dictionary from which I will quote a word much on my mind as I am recovering from spine surgery---making progress--- but ever mindful of my fate: OBLIVION, n. The state or condition in which the wicked cease from struggling and the dreary are at rest.  Fame’s eternal dumping ground.  Cold storage for high hopes.  A place where ambitious authors meet their works without pride and their betters without envy.   A dormitory without an alarm clock.

6=== race, skin colour… as with everything in the United States all institutions  seem to wobble a little when it comes to the colour of the author’s skin.  The LOA of course gave in to the normal segregation impulse by having Toni Morrison “edit” the two books of James Baldwin while friends noted long ago.. now,  40 years ago at Columbia: why is that the NYTimes only had negroes reviewing negroes?   This thought lingered after reading the obit for the death of George Cain, whose novel BLUESCHILD BABY came out and of course it was reviewed by the appropriate negro and there would not be a second book.

7=== so with no Langston Hughes, no Ralph Ellison, a seriously compromised Richard Wright, a stalled James Baldwin, we are presented  with HARLEM RENAISSANCE NOVELS, nine novels ranging from the visible to the obscure.  I will list the titles and the authors: CANE by Jean Toomer, HOME TO HARLEM by Claude McKay, QUICKSAND by Nella Larsen, PLUM BUN by Jessie Redmon Fauset, THE BLACKER THE BERRY by Wallace Thurman, NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER by Langston Hughes, BLACK NO MORE by George S. Schuyler, THE CONJURE-MAN DIES by Rudolph Fisher and BLACK THUDER by Arna Bontemps.  A celebration of academic packaging, and while I am grateful for the chance to read BLACK NO MORE and THE CONJURE-MAN DIES I think  I would rather have had volumes devoted to Nella Larsen, to Jeam Toomer…

9=== of course my voice is small but I am making the point that LOA is one of the few positive aspects of publishing today and as a result I take it seriously and only wish that the LOA… had more courage and filled their volumes with more texts so as to my nearly approach the grandeur of the Pleiade  by which it is still so over-shadowed, so incompetent  when compared with what the French so ably do in the Pleiade which is a commercial venture, we must remember.

10=== a little nutty you might think but then I am running the shop.  Here are some new and forthcoming books that I hope some readers might want to write about as I will also be writing about them:

789: THE ROVING SHADOWS and SEX AND TERROR by Pascal Quignard.  Coming from Seagull Books, the essential publishing house today which together with DALKEY ARCHIVE  and ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS and NEW DIRECTIONS are probably the only actual living publishers today with an occasional alive books from FSG and Knopf.  I am sure you have read Quignard’s THE SALON IN WURTTEMBERG, ALBUCIUS , ON WOODEN TABLETS APRONENIA  AVITIA.

790:  PARALLEL STORIES by Peter Nadas, at more than 110 pages, with not a single page that can be skipped.  If I was an editor I would devote a whole issue to this book and Nadas’s other books, but mainly this book.  It is totally accessible, readerly, complicated only in that you the serious reader will only be able to read a page or two at a time… so you see the problem--- there will be many fake reviews of this book, cribbing from various handout from publishers…

791: again from SEAGULL, two books by Annemarie Schwarzenbach: ALL ROUTES ARE OPEN, in Juner 1939 two women drive to Afghanistan…  enough said .  Also, published is LYRIC NOVELLA  which disguises a lesbian subtext as the two protagonists of this novel should have been women…

793: from Yale, Two volumes of the Letters of T. S. Eliot so with finally the publication of the letters bck on track one can read for him or herself the life of the author of the only poem that is likely to survive the 20^th Century, THE WASTE LAND.  Well annotated and indexed the reader has been freed from the sleazy popularizations of aspects of Eliot’s life in favor of reading it from his own view point and then the making up of the mind

794:  from New Directions: NEVER ANY END TO PARIS by ENRIQUE  Vila-Matas.  I began reading this before I went to hospital for surgery; I read it in recovery and continue to read it: I am rationing it out one chapter a day.  I do not want it to end.  You most likely have his Bartleby & Co, which I reviewed but in this one we are with Vila-Matas, living in Marguerite Duras’s attic room and discovering Paris as a poor young man, using sometimes texts from Hemingway as his reliable guide, as his treasured guide… a perfect book as it depends upon its readers in a comforting sort of way.

795:  from DALKEY ARCHIVE: Gerald Murnane is from Australia and while that is reason enough to never read him as it is for the poor slobs who call Canada home, MURNANE is an exception.  Years ago Braziller published a little book of his THE PLAINS which was his hook and people thought of course he was writing about the plains in the US… but no, he is the only writer in Australia who writes as if he is living in Paris, in London, In New York, never provincial, never isolated, he becomes universal by his complete attention to what is in front of him… BARLEY PATCH:  the first line:  Must I write?

796: from DALKEY ARCHIVE:  DUKLA by Andzej Stasiuk. DUKLA deals with light, a journey to discover light, to describe light, whatever do we mean when we talk about the light of a certain place…

I reviewed his ON THE ROAD TO BABADAG for the LATimes:  here is my version---- ON THE ROAD TO BABADAG Travels in the Other Europe by Andrzej  Stasiuk

The best travel books like “On the Road to Babadag” are read for more than mere information, they are read in order to go.  Setting out from his tiny village of Czarny near the Polish Slovakian border , Andrzej Stasiuk heads for that area where the Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary come together, not a exactly a destination  immediately called to mind when we say a person went traveling in Europe.  And from there he goes on to further reaches of an obscure Europe, Albania and eventually the coast of Romania where the Danube dissipates into the Black Sea near the town of Babadag.

Stasiuk, now the most prolifically translated Polish writer with six other books in English, is a patient traveler, “Sometimes in the dark, you saw sparks from a horseshoe.”  As Whitman was Kerouac’s Shade in “On the Road” E.M. Cioran  (“The Short History of Decay”) is Stasiuk’s  welcome literary ghost, for  in the Cioran’s native village, he notices the smells, ” the soil between the cobblestones had collected a century of horse piss; wisps of the stable from innumerable harnesses; from the fields came the choking air of pasture, from the gutters the cesspool seep of barns and sties; and one day in the river I saw entrails floating.”  Hard stuff, but the genius of Stasiuk is in the necessary contrasting quote from Cioran,” It would have been better for me had I never left this village.  I’ll never forget the day my parents put me on the cart and took me to the lyceum in town.  That was the end of my beautiful dream, the destruction of my world.” 

Of course the reader is entering a place where all familiar landmarks are gone, a place where, “For us everything starts or ends with a war.”  It is place where work is still real, a place where one feels “the enormity and continuity of the world.”  A place where one sees, “between two rows of houses moved a herd of sated cattle.  They were accompanied by women in kerchiefs  and worn boots or by children.  No isolated island of industrialization, no sleepless metropolis no spiderweb of roads  and railroad lines could block out this image as old as the world,  The human joined with the bestial to wait out the night together.”

Stasiuk takes us to real places and on the Day of the Dead he lights candles in a war cemetery, ”the roots of these trees have been  feeding for more than seventy years on the bodies of Estonians and Croats, in a corner of the world no one visits.” 

Go travel with Stasiuk this summer.  You don’t need a plane ticket.

So what remains? 

Tell me what you have found!