I published the following review of THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS in The Washington Times on November 17, 1996. It was one of very few reviews that book received. It was not quoted on the paperback version. When I called The Washington Times today (October 8, 2009) they can not access it as back issued are not available. One of course feels compassion for Herta Muller for by winning the Nobel Prize...
Of course, in the United States what passes for a novel has sunk even lower...
Finally, a book that describes in precisely hewn detail what it was like to live in Romania under communism. By paying careful attention to the slightest nuances of life in Romania the book also gives an accurate description of what it was like to be alive anywhere in Eastern Europe during the years of communism.
Author Herta Muller was born in 1953 into the large German-speaking minority in Romania, and like the narrator of her new novel, she was driven to leave Romania in 1987. In 1989, her short episodic novel The Passport" was published here in translation. But it only hints at the startling originality of "The Land of the Green Plums," which is seamlessly translated by poet Michael Hofmann. It faithfully follows the original German edition in terms of typography and spacing, which emphasize the poetic nature of the text and make it easier to follow the subtle shifts of mood and voice.
By tracing out the varied fates of five young persons who meet at a provincial college--- Lola, Edgar, Kurt, Georg and the narrator--- Miss Muller has constructed a devastating portrait of how ordinary lives were twisted and devoured by the fear that was purposefully created by the rulers of Eastern Europe, in this case, Nicolae Ceausescu.
The books of Czeslaw Milosz, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda Mandelstam have prepared us for the the awfulness of that life, which distorted every aspect of the human personality. If I were to tell you of being arrested in Bulgaria in 1967 for writing on a table-cloth, "No communists. No capitalists. Only free people. All you need is love." you might think I was putting you on. (I am not) Similarly, one's first reaction is disbelief when Miss Muller describes what happens after Lola, a fellow student and friend of the narrator, hangs herself.
"Five girls stood by the entrance-way of the dormitory. Inside the glass display case was Lola's picture, the same as the one in her Party book. Under the picture was a piece of paper. Somoeone read out loud: This student has committed suicide. We abhor her crime and we despise her for it. She has brought disgrace upon the whole country... At four o'Clock in the afternoon, in the great hall, two days after she hanged herself, Lola was expelled from the party and exmatriculated from the university. Hundreds of people were there. Someone stood at the lectern and said, She deceived us all, she doesn't deserve to be a student in our country or a member of out party. Everybody applauded."
The horror is in the pronouns: us, we, our.
Miss Muller has construced a novel that violates every rule of what was expected of a novelist in communist Romania. It also might be said that the book goes against neary every expectation of what passes for a novel today in America. It eschews plot. What is happening line by line, page by page, outweighs any interest in what is going to happen next. We live within the head and central nervous system of the narrator. But it is not a claustrophobic place to be: The voice is alive to the world, defiantly alive in a determination to fail in the construction of positive, uplifting characters.
Miss Muller relies upon the sensibility and intelligence of her readers to understand that they are being asked to enter into the consciousness of the narrator, who makes her way through a life that offers nothing but suicide, exile and betrayal. Her narrator also undersands that, having survived that world and made it to Germany, one still has been irrevocably mutilated in spirit by this world where, "you could feel the dictator and his guards hovering over all the secret escape plans, you could feel them lurking and doling out fear."
The title of the book says much, but it needs a little explanation: "Plumsucker was a term of abuse. Upstarts, opportunists, sycophants and people who stepped over the dead bodies without remorse were caled that. The dictator was called a plumsucker, too."
In a country run by such people, it got you labeled as a dangerous dissident if you were even mildly lacking in enthusiasim for the communist future and wished to maintain some sense of ordinary decency and privacy. Once singled out, the characters in the novel can never escape the attentions of the police and their accomplices.
Miss Muller ranges across the whole of Romanian society, from the peasants ground down by hunger and casual brutalization to the industrial workers who work in dnagerous factories making useless articles no one wants. Her depiction of the degraded workewrs in a slaughterhouse is unequaled anywhere in the literature from Eastern Europe. The men drink the blood of the slaughtered animals and trade stolen raw animal parts for casual and violently demeaning sex while thinking they are getting back at the regime by so doing.
"The men staggered and yelled at one another before snashing each other over the head with empty bottles. They bled. If a tooth fell to the ground, they would laugh as if someone had lost a button. Someone would bend over, pick up the tooth and toss it into his glass. Because it brought good luck, the tooth was pased from glass to glass. Everyone wanted it"
The narrator, like the other voices she allows to enter her mind, learns that you cant trust anyone, whch is probably the most awful result of communism.
She becoems friends with Tereza whose father is a well-connected sculptor. When the narrator is finally living in Germany, Tereza comes to visit, but she comes as an agent of the police, to spy, since one of the narrator's friends has either jumped or been pushed from a window to his death. Tereza is meant to be sympathetic: She has cancer, no luck in love, and yet she betrays the narrator, who alone has been nice to her.
And of the man who has driven two of the narrator's friends to suicide and another into a miserable exile, representing thousands, probably, the author laments that there has been no retribution, no closure, no justice.
This is the horrifying and unblinking truth of this novel and why it has to live on. Miss Muller has triumphed in her honesty, and "The Land of the Green Plums" is her testimony.
PS: and to date, all those communists and fellow travelers for the most part got away with it and in many cases turned themselves into the so-called mafia--- but that is another tale waiting to be told as the former communists and their fellow travelers go about convincing the world that they are the only people who really suffered under the communism
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
DID SCHEHERAZADE'S VAGINA LUBRICATE AT THE...
The other night Denis Donoghue was over for dinner and the unspoken or the unsaid was talked about. When he was growing up in Northern Ireland religion and politics for obvious reasons were not talked about. Many think that race is another more American thing not spoken about but he suggested that taste was the most unspoken thing today. We are not prepared to challenge another's taste in anything. I discovered something else inside the world of the unsaid. The copy desk at the Los Angeles Times made me aware that one is not allowed in that paper to write this sentence: Did Scheherazade's vagina lubricate at the approach of the caliph?
(from JACKET COPY the book blog at the LOS ANGELES TIMES)
(please insert my sentence at the appropriate moment)
Thomas McGonigle, an occasional contributor to the book review, caught Nélida Piñon in New York City.
Does Scheherazade get aroused at the thought of having sex with the Caliph?
That was the unexpected question Brazilian writer Nélida Piñon recently explored with preeminent translator Gregory Rabassa before an audience in New York on the occasion of her controversial new novel “Voices of the Desert.” The novel, which is an erotic retelling of “One Thousand and One Nights,” led Piñon and Rabassa to a question no one in the assembly hall of the Americas Society on Park Avenue could have expected. (The original question, I assure you, was even saltier.)
At 73, Piñon seems the elegant epitome of anyone’s favorite aunt — but appearances are deceptive. She was the first female president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (elected in 1996). A protégé of Clarice Lispector and her last literary confidant, Piñon said she did not talk to Lispector’s recent biographer, Benjamin Moser, because a confidant should not give up her confidences.
Piñon is the author of numerous novels, now published in all the major languages. English translations of her work include “The Republic of Dreams” and “Caetana’s Sweet Song.” In discussing “Voice of the Desert,” she denies that the novel is a radical critique of the situation of a woman in Muslim society -- rather, Piñon is a novelist rooted in the actuality of a woman’s flesh. This is why the answer she gave, to the question mentioned above, was powerful in its simplicity. How could Scheherazade be aroused?
“A woman does not make love under compulsion to a tyrant,” she explained.
Later, after the talk, I wanted to see how Piñon’s views may have changed over the years. I reminded her that Scheherazade had surfaced in another interview she’d had — 17 years ago — with me about writing and the sources of one’s inspiration. She had been talking about what it was like to care for her mother when she was gravely ill — and how that experience led to another memory of her being sick as a child and being cared for by her mother:
My mother would follow me about the house, in the garden always presenting me with food, trying to get me to eat. For some reason I was refusing to eat. In order to seduce me she started to tell me a story. For each spoon of food I accepted, she was obliged to advance the story. As soon as I had a portion of words that corresponded with the spoonful of food, I immediately refused to open my mouth unless she would deliver more words. It was a verbal game: My mother at that time was a Scheherazade eager to protect my life instead of stealing it. She was my first living writer.
“Yes,” she said, after the talk, “That was true: But it was really my mother’s loving words that opened my mouth.”
Also during that earlier conversation, years ago, Piñon had mentioned how difficult it was to be a writer in a country like Brazil where half the population did not own a pair of shoes. Today, she says the situation is even worse -- not only in Brazil, but the world at large.
“Today our whole attitude toward money has changed," she said. "From the newspapers it would seem that, in America, even a mediocre actor expects to get a million dollars for a movie, and a ticket for 'Tosca' in New York can cost more than $1,200! It is terrible to be a young person in such an atmosphere.”
(from JACKET COPY the book blog at the LOS ANGELES TIMES)
(please insert my sentence at the appropriate moment)
Thomas McGonigle, an occasional contributor to the book review, caught Nélida Piñon in New York City.
Does Scheherazade get aroused at the thought of having sex with the Caliph?
That was the unexpected question Brazilian writer Nélida Piñon recently explored with preeminent translator Gregory Rabassa before an audience in New York on the occasion of her controversial new novel “Voices of the Desert.” The novel, which is an erotic retelling of “One Thousand and One Nights,” led Piñon and Rabassa to a question no one in the assembly hall of the Americas Society on Park Avenue could have expected. (The original question, I assure you, was even saltier.)
At 73, Piñon seems the elegant epitome of anyone’s favorite aunt — but appearances are deceptive. She was the first female president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (elected in 1996). A protégé of Clarice Lispector and her last literary confidant, Piñon said she did not talk to Lispector’s recent biographer, Benjamin Moser, because a confidant should not give up her confidences.
Piñon is the author of numerous novels, now published in all the major languages. English translations of her work include “The Republic of Dreams” and “Caetana’s Sweet Song.” In discussing “Voice of the Desert,” she denies that the novel is a radical critique of the situation of a woman in Muslim society -- rather, Piñon is a novelist rooted in the actuality of a woman’s flesh. This is why the answer she gave, to the question mentioned above, was powerful in its simplicity. How could Scheherazade be aroused?
“A woman does not make love under compulsion to a tyrant,” she explained.
Later, after the talk, I wanted to see how Piñon’s views may have changed over the years. I reminded her that Scheherazade had surfaced in another interview she’d had — 17 years ago — with me about writing and the sources of one’s inspiration. She had been talking about what it was like to care for her mother when she was gravely ill — and how that experience led to another memory of her being sick as a child and being cared for by her mother:
My mother would follow me about the house, in the garden always presenting me with food, trying to get me to eat. For some reason I was refusing to eat. In order to seduce me she started to tell me a story. For each spoon of food I accepted, she was obliged to advance the story. As soon as I had a portion of words that corresponded with the spoonful of food, I immediately refused to open my mouth unless she would deliver more words. It was a verbal game: My mother at that time was a Scheherazade eager to protect my life instead of stealing it. She was my first living writer.
“Yes,” she said, after the talk, “That was true: But it was really my mother’s loving words that opened my mouth.”
Also during that earlier conversation, years ago, Piñon had mentioned how difficult it was to be a writer in a country like Brazil where half the population did not own a pair of shoes. Today, she says the situation is even worse -- not only in Brazil, but the world at large.
“Today our whole attitude toward money has changed," she said. "From the newspapers it would seem that, in America, even a mediocre actor expects to get a million dollars for a movie, and a ticket for 'Tosca' in New York can cost more than $1,200! It is terrible to be a young person in such an atmosphere.”
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
ERASING ERASURE HORROR MURDERING MURDER in books and in Estonia
(including a first short homage to Juan Jose Saer)
This entry did not begin with what now comes first but instead began with “Five” and then went on to… but I had intended and now begin as I really wanted to begin: erasure, ERASURE, erasing…
Forty-three:
The new Review of Contemporary Fiction is given over to what remained of Melville’s MOBY DICK after an English publisher sent out into the world a stripped down “reader friendly” version, free of much of what Damion Searls and many other readers actually like about MOBY DICK. The English editors, for instance, removed the dedication to Hawthorn and the whole section, “ Etymology,” supplied as you remember by the Usher .
It is true that the rather famous “Call me Ishmael “ is not included in this version of what remains… but he ends the book on a blank page where we read EPILOGUE. Searls’ version includes every bit of punctuation, every word that had been discarded by the English editor... a new book has been created.
Forty-four
Of course, some readers might have been reminded of Ronald Johnson discovering (1977) inside PARADISE LOST a new poem that Johnson entitled RADIOS which of course is embodied in the title PARADISE LOST…
The poem begins and I can’t reproduce the typography:
O tree
Into the World
Man
The chosen
Rose out of Chaos:
song,
Forty-five
And then in 1980, Tom Phillips found a new book (the first of a number of subsequent versions) within a long dead Victorian novel and the resulting A HUMUMENT A Treated Victorian Novel was created by combining found words and phrases from the original with drawings and patterns of colour: the first page reads
Volume And
Side I shall lie,
Bones my bones
A HUMUMENT
Introduction
The following
Sing
I
A book. A book
Of art
Of mind
Art
That
Which
He hid
Revealed I
Forty-six
How far we have come.
No longer is erasing a burden as it was with typewriters and then if there was a carbon copy…
Probably we could tease out the ease of erasure today when compare to back then…
FIVE
I wish I could fall into a project as did Walter Benjamin when he discovered his ARCADES PROJECT… I always feel uncomfortable mentioning Benjamin because of his disgusting Stalinist politics that allowed him to travel and work in Moscow for a time… of course some of his best work is free of those politics but it is still fed by the bad faith that allowed him to make this accommodation… but it was with his idea of quoting that I am taken by…
Seven
"One could structure a narration in terms of a single juxtaposition of memories… The New narration made up of pure memories would have neither beginning nor end. It would be circular narration and the narrator’s position would be like that of the child mounted on the horse of the merry-go-round who at each turn tries to grab the ring. One needs luck, skill and a constant repositioning, all of which does ot guarantee that one will not end up empty-handed." by Juan Jose Saer. Quoted in LITTORAL OF THE LETTER Saer’s Art of Narration by Gabriel Riera.
Juan Jose Saer is the author of many books and essays. Four novels are available in English: THE INVESTOGATION, NOBODY NOTHING NEVER, THE EVENT and THE WITNESS which as a wonderful scene of cannibalism: "Two of the Indians armed with with knives and rudimentary but efficient axes, were already at work on one of the decapitated bodies, slicing it open from the lower abdomen to the throat. No doubt alerted by my look of amazement the Indian who was in the process of the beheading of the bodies stopped what he was doing for a moment and giving me a delightfully frank and friendly smile, waved the hand wielding the knife… The torsos and legs had been cut up to make handling and cooking easier; the arms , however, had been left whole...As well as dense columns of smoke that dispersed only gradually in the air, the meat gave off a powerful but agreeable smell. As the cooking proceeded, the human origins of the meat became less apparent…"
I had first heard of Saer from Alain Robbe-Grillet. Saer had been influenced by Robbe-Grillet and one hopes that more of his books will be translated. His interest in form calls into question everything he writes but in no way is the reader beaten into the earth by his work. His work is a genuine advance beyond Cortazar and Onetti…
Nine
Out in America I discovered that horror books are read in great numbers. I guess I have always known this and one can not escape Stephen King though his popularity has fallen precipitously among undergraduates in the various City University campuses that I frequent… sadly, James Patterson has replaced him… I saw in the big second handbook shops in Nashville and Crossville, Tennessee bookcase after bookcase of horror books… so while at first I was skeptical of the Library of America’s AMERICA’S FANTASTIC TALES edited in two volumes by Peter Straub… I realized that just by the range of authors… starting of course from Poe… who was for a long time better known in France because of Baudelaire’s interest in him…on through Melville, Hawthorne…Ralph Adams Cram, Lafacadio Hearn, Henry James…H, P. Lovecraft…
What is interesting about these selections is that the narration is usually anything but straight forward or nailed to the realistic… the shape is what one is interested in…
The second volume takes the reader into the present when the narration becomes a little more conventional and ordinary but… I liked seeing that T. E. D. Klein has a story in the collection… Klein is a much under-rated writer, editor of Twilight Magazine for many years but for too long he has not written…
The Library of America deserves much praise for this venture into the popular but the continued slighting of Sherwood Anderson is a genuine scandal which I hope they will address… but the names of the older writers: F. Marion Crawford Gertrude Atherton, Robert W. Chambers are of course still on the shelves in second hand bookshops though threaten of disappearing under the tidal wave of broken-spined paperbacks… because it seems people no longer pick up even to browse old hardcover books…
Seventeen
...the memory of an event is not sufficient proof that it really happened. (Juan Jose Saer)
Eleven
THE FRAGILITY OF GOODNESS is a book by Tzvetan Todorov on how Bulgaria avoided sending its Jews to be murdered during World War Two. I thought of that as I am reading Anton Weiss Wendt’s MURDER WITHOUT HATRED Estonians and the Holocaust in which it seems that Estonians with little reluctance did the Nazi’s dirty work for them and killed all the Jews and gypsies in Estonia and even then pitched in when the German murder machine was running at over-capacity in Poland by efficiently processing “shipments “ from Germany, Czechoslovakia and France… To be scrupulous Jews in the parts of Greece occupied by Bulgaria were sent to be murdered but all the Jews from within Bulgaria itself were saved by an actual and real Bulgarian resolve not to give their Jews to be murdered while within Estonia there was no organized, in any sense of that word, to the murder of the Jews… a handful of Jews did escape being murdered because of the extraordinary heroism of a very few individual Estonians. More typical is a passage at random from Wendt’s book reads, “Hans Laats recalled one such case when up to ten children between three and fifteen years of age were murdered. According to Laats, Koppel shot the youngest of the children while holding them by the leg.”
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
INTO AMERICA: on the not reading of IMPERIAL by WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
Going into America.
Have you noticed that the reviews of William T. Vollmann's IMPERIAL have appeared and almost to a word they have been the sort of review that praises and then takes away complaining of the length, the demands placed upon the reader and never does the reviewer admit to not having really read the book?
These reviews do not send people to the reading of IMPERIAL. They allow the reader to conclude that they know enough about the book, know that it has something to do with the border of the United States, with the people who live near the border, about the complexity of a once open border, with a now closed border ( though if anyone remembers LONELY ARE THE BRAVE he or she will remember that the reason the Kirk Douglas character breaks into the jail is to try to help his friend who has been arrested for helping illegals--- and this is in 1962!!! so once again the great forgetfulness, the stupidity of journalists today who think they are telling really anything new to those of us who might still have the faculty of memory).
IMPERIAL is still the most important book of the year, the only essential book to be published this year in these United States even now as the reviews have appeared and even after one or two nice profiles of the author, again which lets people off the hook of actually reading IMPERIAL because reading the article allows them to be "well-informed"--- is this the best reason to NEVER read The New York Times? ... who would want to be well-informed if that has to include reading The New York Times?... I hope you have read Marina Tsvetayeva's precise poem "Readers of Newspapers" which includes these lines:
It crawls, the underground snake
crawls, with its load of people.
And each one has his
newspaper, his skin
disease; a twitch of chewing;
newspaper caries.
Masticators of gum,
readers of newspapers.
...
They swallow emptiness,
these readers of newspapers.
...
Grabbers of small moments
readers of newspapers.
...
It's better to go to a graveyard
than into the prurient
sickbay of scab-scratchers,
these readers of newspapers.
If Tsvetayeva was alive today she would have included the glassy eyed viewers of television "news"... if someone tells you he or she watches CNN... it like the famous dot on the forehead of an Indian woman--- according to V. S. Naipaul--- meaning, you know her head is empty.
IMPERIAL is not meant to be read in one sitting, or many sittings... it can not be so read. And that is the flaw of all the reviews I have seen. None of them confess to not having really read the book. They all pretend to having read it and here is now their considered opinion. This failure to be honest, this dishonesty by pretending to having read is something that David Foster Wallace was well aware of when he would be interviewed or meet reviewers of INFINITE JEST and well knowing that the book had not been read... of course this happened with William Gaddis's THE RECOGNITIONS as documented in Jack Green's FIRE THE BASTARD (Dalkey Archive).
IMPERIAL should be open on a person's desk. The other day Vollmann sent me to read John Steinbeck's The Vigilante in THE LONG VALLEY which I found in the Library of America's edtion of Steinbeck... Steinbeck withholds judgment on a man who has participated in a lynching... trusting his readers to... a trust that our genius well reviewed writers no longer can muster. But it is this sending and the resulting further reading that marks out IMPERIAL and no reviewer as far as I know had commented on this essential detail.. beacause to do so would mean that they could not produce the required judgment for those scab-pickers
Friday, August 21, 2009
BRECHT AT NIGHT:How Estonia takes up residence in the mind
BRECHT AT NIGHT
MATI UNT
Translated from the Estonian
By Eric Dickens
Dalket Archive: 208pp., $13.95
In 1940, Helsinki received an unexpected visitor: Bertold Brecht. Eventually to be known as the most famous German playwright after Goethe, author of The Three Penny Opera, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and numerous other plays, a vast array of poetry, Brecht was also a committed Communist who was on the run from Nazi Germany, believing Hitler personally wanted him dead. The scene is almost comical: he arrived with his wife, his mistress, his children and twenty-six bags of luggage.
Just another traveler, you understand, appreciative when someone speaks good German but convinced he or she might be a Nazi agent. His protector was the very wealthy Estonian playwright then living in Finland, Hella Wuolijoki, with whom he will collaborate on a number of plays and will eventually plagiarize from but who more importantly has a direct link to Stalin and his secret police. (Brecht, if you aren’t familiar with him was an ardent defender of Stalin and all his murderous acts, glibly arguing that Finland should have given into Stalin, “whereby the Finnish workers and peasants must exchange their national freedom for social freedom (inside the Soviet system).”
But why Helsinki? Why go there in the midst of the aftermath of The Winter War? It is a way station on Brecht’s journey to of all places: Hollywood which he intends to get to by way of Moscow and Siberia!
In “Brecht at Night,” his fourth novel to be translated into English, Estonian author and innovative stage director, Mati Unt makes Brecht a curiously compelling contradictory character and very appealing as a reflection of the alienating reality of his plays which highlighting their artificiality allows the reader the necessary distance to think and with the information, with the feelings provide by what he or she might witness, to act…
All this might seem tedious in the extreme but Unt is simply too good of a writer to allow that to happen. The connection between an epitome of irony, Hella Wuolijoki, this wealthy patron, committed communist and the owner of a vast estate provides Unt with the jump cut to that place where she comes from: two hours today by high speed ferry, across the Baltic Sea. If I give you one country (Latvia) that borders on it I am sure you can name the other country that borders on Estonia and of course you remember that in August 1939 you again remember that Hitler and Stalin agreed to the occupation of Estonia by the Red Army…
It is in this lurch that Unt’s novel becomes both a witty portrait of Brecht and is a model of how to understand the devastating effects of Stalinism. Unt well knows, as did Brecht, if you focus too much on details of human awfulness it becomes debilitating but if you find a way…
Unt particularizes the murders, by way of quotation from now available documents and through imagination of how the Communist takeover of Estonia was implemented allowing the euphonious M Unt (no relation) who was the communist appointed Minister of the Interior to say, “With good luck, you have the choice between life and death, and it is not sure which is better.” Or, “Then I had to dismiss all the elders of the various Estonian provinces. There were no doubt decent people among them, but in times like the present you can’t pay too much attention to individuals.”
History records that M. Unt was shot in his turn but no date was recorded.
(A version of this appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
MATI UNT
Translated from the Estonian
By Eric Dickens
Dalket Archive: 208pp., $13.95
In 1940, Helsinki received an unexpected visitor: Bertold Brecht. Eventually to be known as the most famous German playwright after Goethe, author of The Three Penny Opera, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and numerous other plays, a vast array of poetry, Brecht was also a committed Communist who was on the run from Nazi Germany, believing Hitler personally wanted him dead. The scene is almost comical: he arrived with his wife, his mistress, his children and twenty-six bags of luggage.
Just another traveler, you understand, appreciative when someone speaks good German but convinced he or she might be a Nazi agent. His protector was the very wealthy Estonian playwright then living in Finland, Hella Wuolijoki, with whom he will collaborate on a number of plays and will eventually plagiarize from but who more importantly has a direct link to Stalin and his secret police. (Brecht, if you aren’t familiar with him was an ardent defender of Stalin and all his murderous acts, glibly arguing that Finland should have given into Stalin, “whereby the Finnish workers and peasants must exchange their national freedom for social freedom (inside the Soviet system).”
But why Helsinki? Why go there in the midst of the aftermath of The Winter War? It is a way station on Brecht’s journey to of all places: Hollywood which he intends to get to by way of Moscow and Siberia!
In “Brecht at Night,” his fourth novel to be translated into English, Estonian author and innovative stage director, Mati Unt makes Brecht a curiously compelling contradictory character and very appealing as a reflection of the alienating reality of his plays which highlighting their artificiality allows the reader the necessary distance to think and with the information, with the feelings provide by what he or she might witness, to act…
All this might seem tedious in the extreme but Unt is simply too good of a writer to allow that to happen. The connection between an epitome of irony, Hella Wuolijoki, this wealthy patron, committed communist and the owner of a vast estate provides Unt with the jump cut to that place where she comes from: two hours today by high speed ferry, across the Baltic Sea. If I give you one country (Latvia) that borders on it I am sure you can name the other country that borders on Estonia and of course you remember that in August 1939 you again remember that Hitler and Stalin agreed to the occupation of Estonia by the Red Army…
It is in this lurch that Unt’s novel becomes both a witty portrait of Brecht and is a model of how to understand the devastating effects of Stalinism. Unt well knows, as did Brecht, if you focus too much on details of human awfulness it becomes debilitating but if you find a way…
Unt particularizes the murders, by way of quotation from now available documents and through imagination of how the Communist takeover of Estonia was implemented allowing the euphonious M Unt (no relation) who was the communist appointed Minister of the Interior to say, “With good luck, you have the choice between life and death, and it is not sure which is better.” Or, “Then I had to dismiss all the elders of the various Estonian provinces. There were no doubt decent people among them, but in times like the present you can’t pay too much attention to individuals.”
History records that M. Unt was shot in his turn but no date was recorded.
(A version of this appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
Monday, August 10, 2009
REALMS OF MEMORY, RETHINKING FRANCE and A.J. LIEBLING
6
A celebration of REALMS OF MEMORY and RETHINKING FRANCE or LES LEIUX DE MEMOIRE but not forgetting A.J. Liebling
Terrible things are always being said about the French and France but like Auberon Waugh who was once saying--- and I agree with him--- the real problem with the French is that they really do some things so extraordinarily well. Waugh was referring to the French education system and food. I would add literature, the trains, the preservation of the countryside and when it comes to writing modern history the vast project under the direction of Philip Nora knows no parallel in the United States…
Published in a series of what will be seven vast books and that is only a third! of the original project published in French as Les Lieux de Memoire, which I am told to the French ear means more than what has been given as a title of the first three volumes published some years ago by Columbia University Press. It is is a magisterial overview of that thing called France and the French. The three volumes were focused on in Nora’s words: “ in accord with the specificity of memory: (REALMS OF MEMORY) is modeled on organizations found in nature: first its fractures, then its true and false continuities and finally its symbolic attachments.”
In the reality of the printed page volume one took up for instance, Right and Left, Catholics and Seculars, Gaullists and Communists, then the minority religions and lastly the question of time and space. The second volume took up The Traditions: The Land, The Cathedral, The Court, etc and went on to discuss individual writers, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Vidal de La Blache’s Georgraphy of France among others and then concluded with Singularities, LA Coupole, Street Names, The Tour de France, etc… The Third volume took up the Symbols: The Three Colors, Liberty, Equality and Fraternitie , then The Places: Lascaux, Rheims, Verdun etc, and then of course Identifications: from The Gallic Cock via Joan of Arc to Descartes and beyond…
9
But Columbia University Press got tired and four more volumes are now being published by the University of Chicago Press—the third is just out and a fourth is coming next year under the general title RETHINKING FRANCE… and these are to be focused on specific elements of national identity in their material dimensions. Volume One took up The State starting with a chapter, The State: The Tool of the Common Good and on through the formation of the idea of the state with essays on Charlemagne, The King… ending with an essay on the Memoirs of Men of State… The second volume is a book of place, ranging from North-South, France, the Coast, and the Sea, to The Forest , The Region, The Department, The Painter’s Landscaper and ending with A Frontier Memory: Alsace.. the perfect book to actually take when travelling in France when you want to go beyond the facts, just the facts: what -to–see-what- to-eat-where-to-sleep…
The current volume (out this summer) takes us into what many of us experience in France and which cannot be found elsewhere: The Café, The Village Church, Conversation, Gallantry, Notre Dame of Paris and Sacred Coeur of Montmartre…
75
(Now, I have done probably a bad job of it and I know I am spitting into the wind
---this is a good example of the normal self-pity that attaches itself to the bone of any sort of writing that I dare to take up within the terrible isolation that comes to the living curator of a few too many unpublished books---
but I wanted to just mention these books and this project and what a comfort it is to have such books on my shelf and I love the fragmented form of these books and while they are a product of that movement that killed narrative history and while I do know in a half assed sort of way the basic narrative of French history which you need to read in some fashion in these books but I guess now anyone can get that from Wikidepia…)
9
As we are entering a long and great depression under BO, no matter what the newspapers are saying ,it will be good to have such books on the shelf.. books of a demanding nature, filled with many stories, many things as is EMPIRE by William Vollmann which I wrote (again badly) about recently. None of these books --- throw in the ARCADE S PROJECT of Walter Benjamin---are meant to be read in a sitting or a hundred sittings((((also include THE COLLECTED WORKS of Paul Metcalf in 3 volumes))).. they do not grab you and refuse to let you go, as the blurbs would have it when a you are sentenced to read a so-called beach book by say Jonathan Franzen or James Patterson…
In the Essay on The Café the subtitles hold one: A Counteracademy, A Factory for Thought, An Intellectual Laboratory… try imagine that at Applebees America’s Neighborhood what not… or I do remember a professor explaining once upon a time why they did not once upon a time lecture on modern literature In French universities, that’s what is talked about in the cafes… why do we have to repeat it here…
46
Originally, I was supposed to do a Bastille Day post and mention the RETHINKING FRANCE along with the Library of America’s A. J. Liebling volumes devoted to eating or at least in part to eating in France… with the title Between Meals contained in the volume THE SWEET SCIENCE AND OTHER WRITINGS and in an earlier volume WORLD WAR II WRITINGS which contained The Road Back to Paris both of these books are old time celebrations of France, a France that no longer exists, of course, but which hint at what still send young people still to France as Liebling writes, “The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite…”
Of course once having been to France one never seriously read the food writing in the United States… you can dismiss me when I go down this path… and I would dismiss myself if I was reading this in the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona, that tiny intimation of the promised paradise that can also be found in the Marine Motel in Ajo, Arizona… but Liebling creates in the reader a need to believe that time is not gone, time is not moving on… and of course it does not move… as long as the books remain to be read and re-read: the passage of time is defeated. Really?
A celebration of REALMS OF MEMORY and RETHINKING FRANCE or LES LEIUX DE MEMOIRE but not forgetting A.J. Liebling
Terrible things are always being said about the French and France but like Auberon Waugh who was once saying--- and I agree with him--- the real problem with the French is that they really do some things so extraordinarily well. Waugh was referring to the French education system and food. I would add literature, the trains, the preservation of the countryside and when it comes to writing modern history the vast project under the direction of Philip Nora knows no parallel in the United States…
Published in a series of what will be seven vast books and that is only a third! of the original project published in French as Les Lieux de Memoire, which I am told to the French ear means more than what has been given as a title of the first three volumes published some years ago by Columbia University Press. It is is a magisterial overview of that thing called France and the French. The three volumes were focused on in Nora’s words: “ in accord with the specificity of memory: (REALMS OF MEMORY) is modeled on organizations found in nature: first its fractures, then its true and false continuities and finally its symbolic attachments.”
In the reality of the printed page volume one took up for instance, Right and Left, Catholics and Seculars, Gaullists and Communists, then the minority religions and lastly the question of time and space. The second volume took up The Traditions: The Land, The Cathedral, The Court, etc and went on to discuss individual writers, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Vidal de La Blache’s Georgraphy of France among others and then concluded with Singularities, LA Coupole, Street Names, The Tour de France, etc… The Third volume took up the Symbols: The Three Colors, Liberty, Equality and Fraternitie , then The Places: Lascaux, Rheims, Verdun etc, and then of course Identifications: from The Gallic Cock via Joan of Arc to Descartes and beyond…
9
But Columbia University Press got tired and four more volumes are now being published by the University of Chicago Press—the third is just out and a fourth is coming next year under the general title RETHINKING FRANCE… and these are to be focused on specific elements of national identity in their material dimensions. Volume One took up The State starting with a chapter, The State: The Tool of the Common Good and on through the formation of the idea of the state with essays on Charlemagne, The King… ending with an essay on the Memoirs of Men of State… The second volume is a book of place, ranging from North-South, France, the Coast, and the Sea, to The Forest , The Region, The Department, The Painter’s Landscaper and ending with A Frontier Memory: Alsace.. the perfect book to actually take when travelling in France when you want to go beyond the facts, just the facts: what -to–see-what- to-eat-where-to-sleep…
The current volume (out this summer) takes us into what many of us experience in France and which cannot be found elsewhere: The Café, The Village Church, Conversation, Gallantry, Notre Dame of Paris and Sacred Coeur of Montmartre…
75
(Now, I have done probably a bad job of it and I know I am spitting into the wind
---this is a good example of the normal self-pity that attaches itself to the bone of any sort of writing that I dare to take up within the terrible isolation that comes to the living curator of a few too many unpublished books---
but I wanted to just mention these books and this project and what a comfort it is to have such books on my shelf and I love the fragmented form of these books and while they are a product of that movement that killed narrative history and while I do know in a half assed sort of way the basic narrative of French history which you need to read in some fashion in these books but I guess now anyone can get that from Wikidepia…)
9
As we are entering a long and great depression under BO, no matter what the newspapers are saying ,it will be good to have such books on the shelf.. books of a demanding nature, filled with many stories, many things as is EMPIRE by William Vollmann which I wrote (again badly) about recently. None of these books --- throw in the ARCADE S PROJECT of Walter Benjamin---are meant to be read in a sitting or a hundred sittings((((also include THE COLLECTED WORKS of Paul Metcalf in 3 volumes))).. they do not grab you and refuse to let you go, as the blurbs would have it when a you are sentenced to read a so-called beach book by say Jonathan Franzen or James Patterson…
In the Essay on The Café the subtitles hold one: A Counteracademy, A Factory for Thought, An Intellectual Laboratory… try imagine that at Applebees America’s Neighborhood what not… or I do remember a professor explaining once upon a time why they did not once upon a time lecture on modern literature In French universities, that’s what is talked about in the cafes… why do we have to repeat it here…
46
Originally, I was supposed to do a Bastille Day post and mention the RETHINKING FRANCE along with the Library of America’s A. J. Liebling volumes devoted to eating or at least in part to eating in France… with the title Between Meals contained in the volume THE SWEET SCIENCE AND OTHER WRITINGS and in an earlier volume WORLD WAR II WRITINGS which contained The Road Back to Paris both of these books are old time celebrations of France, a France that no longer exists, of course, but which hint at what still send young people still to France as Liebling writes, “The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite…”
Of course once having been to France one never seriously read the food writing in the United States… you can dismiss me when I go down this path… and I would dismiss myself if I was reading this in the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona, that tiny intimation of the promised paradise that can also be found in the Marine Motel in Ajo, Arizona… but Liebling creates in the reader a need to believe that time is not gone, time is not moving on… and of course it does not move… as long as the books remain to be read and re-read: the passage of time is defeated. Really?
Sunday, July 26, 2009
RUSH OUT AND BUY IMPERIAL BY WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
If America needs, as is often said A WRITER that one writer is: WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN.
At the moment he is the only writer in America whose death I would mourn.
Vollmann is the only writer who might and might already be a genuine world writer to whom it would not be necessary to attach mention of his nationality.
No living writer in America can equal his accomplishments and of course you can go to Wikipedia or any of the other sources for all the back ground.
But I stake out my claim by listing:
THE ROYAL FAMILY
RISING UP AND RISING DOWN: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
AN AFGHANISTAN PICTURE SHOW
YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS
EUROPE CENTRAL
(and I would also mention that there are 12, yes, 12 other books that flesh out… and do not clutter…
And NOW AND NOW AND NOW::: IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
And its companion book IMPERIAL Photograpy by William T Vollmann
((((and I well know that eventually there is always a qualification so I will put it up front but the very qualification indicates the seriousness with which I take Vollmann.
As I read Vollmann I am reminded of :
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ernst Junger.
Vollmann, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Junger: the same mixture of riveting objectivity, the same urge to document, the same unashamed emotional identification with whatever they are writing about, the same acidic intellect, the same access to a language unafraid of a genuine apprehension of an always very real possibility of a crippling silence just ahead
And now the distinctions: Solzhenitsyn was actually a prisoner in the Gulag.
Dostoevsky was stood up against a wall and fully expected to be shot for his political beliefs.
Junger fought for five years in World War One in the trenches (receiving the pour le Merite) and was again in the army in World War Two, he actually did drop LSD with Albert Hoffmann, he did do real science as a ……..
And that is the vital difference.
Vollmann has been looking and always there is that distance… things have happened to him but they are a consequence of his looking… and this leads at time to a nagging sense of self-hatred that introduces a tiny thread of distrust into this reader’s consideration of his work…
BUT that is it… so as we move to why he is so central to my understanding of his importance. He is not part of the academy, he is not off in some drearily famous college teaching creative writing or literature, he is no darling of the academy, no one looks up to him, he is not cited as a good role model… he is discovered by word of mouth by readers passing on his books.
Sadly, he does have a literary prize but I am sure he knows just how worthless that is and is appropriately embarrassed by it: the only thing you get from having any sort of literary prize is that it guarantees an obit in the NY Times…
So, IMPERIAL
1306 pages about that part of California centered upon the Imperial Valley… you know where: south of Palm Springs, north of the Mexican border, west of the Colorado River, out there east of LA… a pendant to THE ROYAL FAMILY which was located up there around SF…
You open the book: grey pages black type… white squiggly maps… WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN. IMPERIAL.
A reproduction of a death certificate for a John Doe, Unknown Mexican issued by the County of Imperial, dated 7/29/24 but the copy was issued on Oct 22, 2002.
In Memory of SERAFIN RAMIREZ HERNANDZ unknown, missing, illegal, Mexican. CONTENTS
10 pages worth. More maps drawn by WTV.
Part One
INTRODUCTIONS.
A photograph of a huge cross on a hillside in Slab City.
Chapter 1. THE GARDENS OF PARADISE (1999)
I think we all feel sorry for ‘em
---Border Patrol Officer Gloria I. Chavez, on the subject of illegal aliens.
BODY-SNATCHERS
The All-American Canal was now dark black with phosphorescent streaks where the border’s eyes stained it with yellow tears. --- These lights have been up for about two years. Officer Dan Murray said. Before that, it was generators. Before that, it was pitch black.
He was an older man, getting big in the waist, whose face had been hardened by knowledge into something legendary. For years he’d played his part in the work first begun by Eden’s angel with the flaming sword…
It is RIGHT THERE with the “flaming sword” with “Eden’s angel” that my case rests for the genius of William T. Vollmann and if you do not get it, I probably cannot convince you of it though I will try in future posts … but you should get yourself to a bookstore to get a copy of IMPERIAL. I don’t think Viking is printing up a whole lot of this book and I am sure the book of photographs by Vollmann published by Power House books will also disappear very quickly…
I well know that a new Thomas Pynchon novel is coming out next week but I do know Pynchon is reading Vollmann’s book. Pynchon is self aware enough to regret the poor timing of these two books coming out at the same time. Just one of those things.
At the moment he is the only writer in America whose death I would mourn.
Vollmann is the only writer who might and might already be a genuine world writer to whom it would not be necessary to attach mention of his nationality.
No living writer in America can equal his accomplishments and of course you can go to Wikipedia or any of the other sources for all the back ground.
But I stake out my claim by listing:
THE ROYAL FAMILY
RISING UP AND RISING DOWN: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
AN AFGHANISTAN PICTURE SHOW
YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS
EUROPE CENTRAL
(and I would also mention that there are 12, yes, 12 other books that flesh out… and do not clutter…
And NOW AND NOW AND NOW::: IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
IMPERIAL
And its companion book IMPERIAL Photograpy by William T Vollmann
((((and I well know that eventually there is always a qualification so I will put it up front but the very qualification indicates the seriousness with which I take Vollmann.
As I read Vollmann I am reminded of :
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ernst Junger.
Vollmann, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Junger: the same mixture of riveting objectivity, the same urge to document, the same unashamed emotional identification with whatever they are writing about, the same acidic intellect, the same access to a language unafraid of a genuine apprehension of an always very real possibility of a crippling silence just ahead
And now the distinctions: Solzhenitsyn was actually a prisoner in the Gulag.
Dostoevsky was stood up against a wall and fully expected to be shot for his political beliefs.
Junger fought for five years in World War One in the trenches (receiving the pour le Merite) and was again in the army in World War Two, he actually did drop LSD with Albert Hoffmann, he did do real science as a ……..
And that is the vital difference.
Vollmann has been looking and always there is that distance… things have happened to him but they are a consequence of his looking… and this leads at time to a nagging sense of self-hatred that introduces a tiny thread of distrust into this reader’s consideration of his work…
BUT that is it… so as we move to why he is so central to my understanding of his importance. He is not part of the academy, he is not off in some drearily famous college teaching creative writing or literature, he is no darling of the academy, no one looks up to him, he is not cited as a good role model… he is discovered by word of mouth by readers passing on his books.
Sadly, he does have a literary prize but I am sure he knows just how worthless that is and is appropriately embarrassed by it: the only thing you get from having any sort of literary prize is that it guarantees an obit in the NY Times…
So, IMPERIAL
1306 pages about that part of California centered upon the Imperial Valley… you know where: south of Palm Springs, north of the Mexican border, west of the Colorado River, out there east of LA… a pendant to THE ROYAL FAMILY which was located up there around SF…
You open the book: grey pages black type… white squiggly maps… WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN. IMPERIAL.
A reproduction of a death certificate for a John Doe, Unknown Mexican issued by the County of Imperial, dated 7/29/24 but the copy was issued on Oct 22, 2002.
In Memory of SERAFIN RAMIREZ HERNANDZ unknown, missing, illegal, Mexican. CONTENTS
10 pages worth. More maps drawn by WTV.
Part One
INTRODUCTIONS.
A photograph of a huge cross on a hillside in Slab City.
Chapter 1. THE GARDENS OF PARADISE (1999)
I think we all feel sorry for ‘em
---Border Patrol Officer Gloria I. Chavez, on the subject of illegal aliens.
BODY-SNATCHERS
The All-American Canal was now dark black with phosphorescent streaks where the border’s eyes stained it with yellow tears. --- These lights have been up for about two years. Officer Dan Murray said. Before that, it was generators. Before that, it was pitch black.
He was an older man, getting big in the waist, whose face had been hardened by knowledge into something legendary. For years he’d played his part in the work first begun by Eden’s angel with the flaming sword…
It is RIGHT THERE with the “flaming sword” with “Eden’s angel” that my case rests for the genius of William T. Vollmann and if you do not get it, I probably cannot convince you of it though I will try in future posts … but you should get yourself to a bookstore to get a copy of IMPERIAL. I don’t think Viking is printing up a whole lot of this book and I am sure the book of photographs by Vollmann published by Power House books will also disappear very quickly…
I well know that a new Thomas Pynchon novel is coming out next week but I do know Pynchon is reading Vollmann’s book. Pynchon is self aware enough to regret the poor timing of these two books coming out at the same time. Just one of those things.
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