No, don’t expect the more common rabbit out of the hat this time, but marvel at that far more spectacular crocodile – and even an elephant! – b[image]
No, don’t expect the more common rabbit out of the hat this time, but marvel at that far more spectacular crocodile – and even an elephant! – being pulled out of a magic pocket: Quentin Blake’s miss Angelica Sprocket whips up umbrellas, a sink, mice, cheese and different delights from her overcoat’s plentiful pockets to offer them to the children of the neighbourhood.
Sweet and imaginative, I was pointed to this charming book by the one I love – who knew how much I would enjoy it, because he is ever amazing me and making me laugh by wearing coats which might not be as shockingly pink as Angelica Sprocket’s, but have magic pockets galore stuffed with incredible things too (books, nut bars, tote bags and mysterious things I will not name).
You don’t see any children or grandchildren around to read it with? Just plunge into it yourself for ten minutes, Angelica Sprocket will probably make you smile awhile....more
While I am not exactly horse-mad nor prone to the romantic cult of Sis(s)i, aka Elizabeth, empress of Austria & queen of Hungary (18Equus optimus
While I am not exactly horse-mad nor prone to the romantic cult of Sis(s)i, aka Elizabeth, empress of Austria & queen of Hungary (1837-1898), I cannot deny that I was pleasantly surprised by Karen Duve’s playful historical novel Sisi - superiorly entertaining, witty and delightfully irreverent, it offered a couple of hours of breezy reading pleasure, the perfect choice at a time I am not at my best health-wise.
In 48 brief chapters, mostly chronologically presented scenes give a assiduously detailed view into this life that has been amply mythologised, the subject of countless films, series and books and on which the city of Vienna is still capitalizing, having turned the empress into big tourist business, which is quite ironical because she spent most of her imperial life elsewhere and often abroad (in Bad Ischl, the Palace of Gödöllő(Hungary), Engeland, Korfu) and because Elisabeth loathed Vienna and the entire court as vehemently as they hated her.
Largely based on the diary her confidante and favourite Hungarian lady in waiting Countess Marie Festetics von Tolna kept between 1871 and 1898 and an impressive list of historical sources and documents, the portrait of the Austro-Hungarian empress and her entourage that Duve sketches in this novel is sobering as well as compelling, nuanced and exhilarating.
The novel focusses on Sisi’s life between 1876 and 1877 and kicks off in Althorp, England, where Sisi will participate in the fox hunt, meeting the Scotsman Bay Middleton, an attractive redhaired and freckled horseman as much hippophile, skilful and dare-devilish like herself who will accompany her as her pilot, revealing from the beginning the true passion of Duve’s Sisi: horse-riding. Duve’s writing craft and gift for storytelling show at their best in the breathtaking riding scenes which despite abhorring hunting (trigger warning: Duve pretty graphically evokes the cruelty of ‘sport hunting’) had me on the edge of my chair, the galloping through the woods and dangerous manoeuvres making the adrenaline rush by proxy. Like her son Rudolf seems to feel the need to kill to feel alive, Sisi turns to horses to breathe freely, as an escape and a consolation.
[image]
(This painting by Karl Theodor von Piloty and Franz Adam is mentioned in the novel as Franz Joseph’s favourite painting of his wife Sisi. It depicts the 15-year-old Duchess Elisabeth of Bavaria on horseback against the backdrop of the Lake Starnberg and Possenhofen castle, the summer residence of her parents. The painting hung in the emperor’s bedroom at the Hofburg, the winter Habsburg residence in Vienna for 60 years — until the death of Franz Joseph.)
Keen on hunting, grotesquely obsessed by the care for her extremely slender body and wasp waist and her incredibly long hair, forever seeking to escape the boredom of the stiffening etiquette and monotony of court life, Sisi is essentially lonely and aloof, unable to connect to human beings in the same way as to horses, even almost indifferent to her own son Rudolf simply because the young man is not a skilful horseman – almost unmatched as a skilled horsewoman, she can only respect her equestrian equals. Fickle, vain, quirky, headstrong, manipulative, requiring absolute and exclusive dedication from anyone near to her – her husband, the loyal and self-sacrificing Marie Festetics, her purported lover Bay Middleton, her ingenue and admiring niece Marie Louise baroness of Wallersee, her children – whom she doesn’t all love indiscriminately - the empress plays with people as a listless puppeteer to distract herself from her consuming fear of aging and losing her principal asset, her blinding beauty, dropping people or instrumentalising them whenever and how she sees fit.
While the copiousness of details, the searing emptiness of the everyday imperial routines and Duve’s detached and laconic writing style at first rather keep the reader at bay, slowly Duve manages to entice if not the reader’s empathy, at least a certain sympathy for Sisi, that brave little horse – after all, she is no more or less than another flawed human being, like all of us.
Having picked this novel also because we hope to visit Vienna once more in September and apart from a visit to the Kapuzinergruft have thoughtlessly neglected exploring imperial Vienna and Schönbrunn the previous time for the sake of Schiele and Klimt and the stunning museum collections, Duve’s intriguing novel both strengthened my desire to read more about the Habsburgs and rekindled some long forgotten details on Sisi's life drawn from reading six volumes from a series pivoting around Sisi which an aunt gifted me when I was a child – saccharine and romantic books for young girls translated from the French Hachette collection Idéal Bibilothèque (written by Odette Ferry, Suzanne Pairault and Marcel d’Isard).
For in-depth reviews and more background information, see the excellent reviews of Alexandra and Steffi....more
There is always something luminous in the face of a person in the act of reading. (Paul Theroux, from the introduction)
[image]
When I started browsiThere is always something luminous in the face of a person in the act of reading. (Paul Theroux, from the introduction)
[image]
When I started browsing through this book with photographs from people caught in the act of reading at the local library, it struck me as a marvellous counterpart in colour of the gorgeous black and white photographs of readers from the Hungarian photographer André Kertész, collected in his book On Reading(1971) which a friend brought to my attention some years ago. Reading on, it made me smile that Steve McCurry qualifies his own collection as his homage to André Kertész - “his talent, his influence, and his genius”.
Picturing people over the world absorbed in books, comics, newspapers, study material, Steve McCurry evokes what humankind unites by showing what readers have in common, hooked they all are to the magic spell of the written or printed word, regardless of age, culture or place.
[image]
[image]
The introduction by Paul Theroux failed to warm me. Looking at other readers reading however enabled this devoted reader to thankfully forget about these cold and rainy April days for a moment. Even if photography in colour usually speaks less to me than photography in black and white, many of these photographs impressed me with their magnificent composition, their luminosity and opulent, intense colour palette, having a painterly quality.
[image]
[image]
The photographs reminded me of a picture of a man sitting in front of a temple reading the newspaper, that I am keeping in a box with pictures of long bygone days, taken in Kathmandu (or Bhaktapur, or Patan? I don’t remember anymore) by my first spouse who dreamt about working as a photographer himself and to whom Steve McCurry’s photographic portrait Afghan Girl from 1984 was a beacon of inspiration, although he mostly chose to shoot photographs in black and white.
Je kunt hier weinig anders doen dan zijn, een tijd graag zien en daarna op z’n zachtst verdwijnen. (uit Helium)
Zomaar gevonden, in de bibliotheek op een Je kunt hier weinig anders doen dan zijn, een tijd graag zien en daarna op z’n zachtst verdwijnen. (uit Helium)
Zomaar gevonden, in de bibliotheek op een zaterdagmiddag in maart, eerst langzaam grasduinend, dan toch maar alle tijd nemend om van het eerste gedicht naar het laatste te lezen, bedenk ik maar hoe juist het is wat Ester Naomi Perquin in haar voorwoord schrijft over de keuze die ze maakte uit de mooiste gedichten van Bart Moeyaert:
Een bloemlezing, zelfs een zeer royale, is steevast een momentopname. Maar ik geloof dat alle vormen van lezen momentopnamen zijn – wat je de ene keer aangrijpt of opvalt, glijdt een volgende keer langs je heen. Waar je de ene keer blijft haken achter een merkwaardige zin, struikel je de volgende keer over een metafoor.
De liefde dus, en welke gedaanten die liefde aanneemt, tussen geliefden, tussen broers, tussen ouders, tussen ouders en kinderen– het vinden en het verlies ervan, het afscheid ervan nemen en het voortbestaan ervan na de dood.
Intiem, soms speels, soms verstild, soms teder, soms grappig, maar telkens weer, telkens weer zoals de liefde, soms ietwat ingewikkeld en soms eenvoudigweg heerlijk, en mooi.
[image]
Enkele favorieten:
Aquarel Dit is een aquarel: een schilderij van waterverf op dik karton. Ik wist niet wat ik wou toen ik eraan begon en nu het af is heb ik er nog het raden naar. Wat doet die vlek daar op dat schip, wat doet die vrouw, waarom een zee, had ik dan blauw in overschot, dat denk ik niet, ik denk haast nooit als ik mijn vinger doop in mijn verdriet of in het jouwe en ermee schrijf of teken, maar ik moet niet doen alsof. Per slot van rekening weet iedereen dat alles – alles – over liefde gaat.
Boomgaard Kom hier, dat ik je bijt, je als een appel eet, en – zoals dat gaat – van blijdschap niet meer weet waar ik mijn handen laat. Je bent een boomgaard, eigenlijk, waarvan ik graag de vruchten pluk, de bloesems ruik, zoals vandaag. Kijk maar: weer raak ik hier mijn handen kwijt, nu ik je in mijn armen bijt en als een appel eet, en weet hoe liefde smaakt.
De ware liefde Wat zou je doen, zei de buurman, als je morgen in de keukenla de ware liefde vond? Of om het minder gek te maken, voor je deur? Ik zei: meneer, ik zou er in de eerste plaats zo goed als mogelijk voor zorgen en ik zou orde scheppen, denk ik. Alle vorken bij de vorken. En de drempel zou ik schrobben voor als het nog een keer gebeurt....more
The art of disappearance - meeting the art of finding
Every great story has one line that is its heart, its vital essence concentrated in but a feThe art of disappearance - meeting the art of finding
Every great story has one line that is its heart, its vital essence concentrated in but a few words, its lambent core. This is the one line that illuminates everything, that lets us feel the story, a story of things that flicker, things that fade.
[image]
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is an amusing, imaginative and playful collection of 19 short stories which revolve around recurrent and connected motives and themes like time, disappearance, vanishing, getting lost and found – the evanescence of things, people and words. In the story What remains of Claire Blanck only the footnotes remain, the actual story they are commenting on has vanished. Nonetheless the footnotes give the impression to reflect on other stories in the collection, the blanked out words on the almost white pages illustrating the leitmotif of disappearance, emphasizing what went missing, was omitted or deleted: All short stories are about loss, but more, perhaps, about the traces things leave behind. All short stories are ghost stories.. A man witnesses how his belongings and furniture are gradually disappearing from his flat (One art). A brother tries to keep an eye on his sister but cannot hold on to her (Sister).
All these books, she said, their pages are empty, perfect blanks until you begin to read.
There is a sense of gentle enchantment to these dreamlike stories, of which some have a fabular quality (The Neva Star, Violons and pianos are horses, with a nod to Nietzsche). A few are inspired by factual material drawn from the history of film and photography, forgotten pioneers like a Hippolyte Bayard who protested against the lack of recognition he faced by staging a picture of himself as a drowned man.
Photography is a way of creating permanence where none exists.
[image]
Some stories – in a way perhaps all the stories - thematize the art of storytelling, reflecting on the process of writing, documenting how the aspiring short story writer correlates to the masters of the short story genre – Chekhov inevitably but also French and American and other Russian authors (Gogol, Kharms, Dovlatov, Zoshchenko ) (A brief history on the short story: I wish for a skilled pen, the careful placing of each element, the timing of a slow reveal to a crushing truth. On the moment you might pounce Borges! Carver! Rose steals your thunder and throws the name on the table himself. Rather than simply exaggerating in casual namedropping however, Rose makes it part of the fun, toying with Bergson, Walter Benjamin and St Augustine in an airy and humorous way that reminded me of the short stories of Antonio Tabucchi. Only in one – rather sweet - story I wondered about the need to give away the author of the story that is on the menu of the English class (Proud woman, pearl necklace, twenty years). A story titled by the song I’m in love with a German film star that is entirely constructed from and structured through songs made me smile. There is nothing like music from one’s younger days that can rekindle memories of strong feelings (All cats are grey, Struggle for pleasure, Four hours).
If only life had a shape. If only life had the sense of a story.
The titular story – an exercise in alternate history - and the focus of the art of storytelling reminded me that for a short time I had access to a digital copy of Walter Benjamin’s own fiction The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness that expired before I could read it, which in the light of Rose’s theme strikes me as apt as well as ironic. An adroit, cheerful and charming collection which is well-worth reading, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea also has the merit to rekindle my curiosity about that collection, if only to experience these acute words of Benjamin on storytelling within the text they belong: The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life to be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.
Thanks to the author, Melville House Publishing, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.
There were days with sunshine and drifting clouds, there were evenings with rain from the southwest and misty mornings when the pine trees were barelyThere were days with sunshine and drifting clouds, there were evenings with rain from the southwest and misty mornings when the pine trees were barely visible. Not completely dark, but still not light enough to distinguish the closest trees from the rest of the forest. The ash tree motionless. Easter lilies in the garden, like small white bonfires scattered in an unknown shadowland. Suddenly it was autumn.
[image]
Same as when someone would serve me a plate topped with Brussels sprouts, I noticed my nose crinkling up when I cracked this novel, rather sceptical and unwilling to read it because I grudgingly recalled what a slog it was to toil my way through this author’s novel Before I Burn, which was on the program of my IRL reading group a couple of years ago. If this novel hadn’t been on the list of the group, I wouldn’t have touched any novel of the Norwegian author Gaute Heivoll again, regardless of Karl Ove Knausgård acclaiming Heivoll as ‘the finest literary voice of his generation’.
Because I wanted it to be over as quickly as possible, I burnt through the pages, however everything in this novel inspires the reader to take it in a slow pace, from the lengthy descriptions of the landscapes, the fields and the forests to the meticulously detailed depictions of the routines of daily life.
While cleaning out the house where he used to live with his parents, his sister and a group of eight mentally disabled patients – among them five siblings - in their foster care, the narrator looks back on the events from the first memories of his uncommon childhood in the place until the death of his parents. Creating for their residents a homely environment in lieu of an institutional one, they reminded me of the foster family care system for the mentally ill in the town of Geel, be it in a remote rural setting of stark beauty instead of in a small town community where many families instead of just one participate in the caregiving.
The narrative spans several decades, which implies that the narrator lives through the deaths and funerals of quite a few of the characters. The well and ill living together raises a few ethical issues (on sterilisation of the intellectually disabled), questioning the blurry lines between normality, neurodiversity and intellectual and mental disability. Yet the reader merely gets to see the functioning of the community from the perspective of the narrator, insights on how the residents experience their lives are mostly missing – not only because the narrator as a child doesn’t grasp the full picture of the events but also because of the debilitating tragedy that strikes the narrator’s own family and that will overshadow the relationships in the family, stretching the ability of each family member to cope with the loss while they continue to take on responsibility for their large foster family. How much room is there for others when one is shattered oneself?
[image]
Fortunately, even if there were quite a few moments in which the writing struck me as clunky and the storytelling as repetitive and flatly factual, this novel gradually grew into a more compelling read than Before I Burn. Its apotheosis in the last chapter gripped me as movingly serene – quite surprisingly, because church scenes rarely touch a chord with me and rather tend to irritate me, perhaps because having spent considerable time kneeling on church pews in the cold when I was a child.
I slept lightly. I glided like strange, deformed air bubbles under the ice, and awoke before sunrise. I lay very still under my duvet, as if a blanket of snow lay on my chest, and I heard bees buzzing peacefully outside the window. Everything blossomed, and the bees flew through the evenings as if they carried the weight of their dreams on their backs.
The novel is slightly wistful but not bleak. Giving space to moments of beauty and imagination and partly autobiographical, it is unsentimental but warm-hearted – evoking the better sides of human nature and inspiring hope, even for someone who if not cynical on societal indifference about this topics, at least is sometimes pessimistic on the sheer possibility of adequately helping the ones who mentally do not fit in to lead a life in human dignity. ...more
A police investigation regarding a brutal, ingenious and atrocious murder on a well-loved and humanitarian industrialist who is leaving behind [image]
A police investigation regarding a brutal, ingenious and atrocious murder on a well-loved and humanitarian industrialist who is leaving behind a unmournful widow keen on both taking over her late husband’s empire and regaining her freedom takes the reader on a journey from the Bay of the Somme to fin de siècle Paris- from stately hôtels to shabby ateliers of painters, to cafés and cabarets in Montmartre where anarchists, models, prostitutes and communists gather. Amaury Broyan is the moody detective on duty, parallelly investigating the death of his own daughter, unravelling the tentacles of power and money in times men abuse women just because they can. [image] Philippe Pelaez and Alexis Chabert offer a savoury detective story paired with a critical view on society , cast in deliciously elegant and stunningly beautiful art work inspired by Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), reminiscent of Mucha’s series of decorative panels The Seasons and of flowers, depicting beautiful women in lavish floral settings. [image] [image] Even if the plot and the denouement might be a little predictable and the prose (at least in translation) rather florid, this comic book is a visual treat that might particularly appeal to lovers of the art nouveau style and the atmosphere of Paris in the Belle Epoque . Apparently the first part of a series that will be starring detective Amaury Broyan, I look forward to the moment I can lay my hands on the next instalment, set in the same time period and promising more opulent and sumptuous stagings, Hiver, à l'Opéra.
Each chapter is preceded by an extract from Nelly Roussel’s Quelques lances rompues pour nos libertés (1910) (Some Lances broken for Our Liberties). Her words are all too apt relating to the story – harrowingly so.
Nelly Roussel (1878-1922) was one of the first birth control advocates in France, emphasizing women’s bodily autonomy in her speeches and letters, focussing on women’s health, pain control during childbirth and free access to birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies, regardless of the social or marital status of the woman.
Quite a timely read on the eve of International Women’s Day....more
Reading Parade is like walking over shards of broken glass sunken to and shattered over the bottom of a lake, a venture tEmbracing the Mundus Inversus
Reading Parade is like walking over shards of broken glass sunken to and shattered over the bottom of a lake, a venture to approach with caution, not only to avert getting wounded but also not to overlook the polished diamonds among the treacherous slivers. Threading along, I found myself highlighting many sentences, lured by their brilliance or struck by their acuity and provocativeness.
The rarity of love. The omnipresence and pluriformity of violence, oppression and cruelty in human relationships. The longing for versus the fighting against death. The creative drive as a ruthless inner force that propels the artist into mania, if not egotism and abuse. The anxiety for conformity. The impossible impasse of motherhood, inexorably traumatising and wrecking both mother and child. Anger and hatred pervading relationships and burning underneath the surface of innocuous words. The universe of Rachel Cusk might be one abound with art, erudition and tantalizing thought, it is also quite brutal, inhospitable and chilly. Nature is mostly hostile and menacing, even dawn brings no hope but curious devastation, a relentless casting of new light on old failures.
Divided in four sections, the book’s fragmented structure and multiple alternating narrative perspectives, the nameless characters and various locations offer the reader little to hold onto, yet Cusk transfixes the reader to the page, unable to stop watching. Perspectives are not simply shifting but erratic, the narrative seems to explode into a shamanic dance between singular and plural narrators, victims and perpetrators, mothers and children, husbands and wives, artists and their family.
This is not a conventional novel, going beyond simple non-linear storytelling, stitching together biographical cut-outs of lives of (real and maybe also fictitious ) artists as in a miniature Künstlerroman, essayistic reflections on art and artists, thematising writing, creativity, storytelling, freedom, the body, gender, identity, responsibility, motherhood, power dynamics within the family and death. The section ‘The Diver’ echoes the party in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, bringing in its own Septimus Smith; I intuit many more literary allusions (Rilke?) and intertextual references which have escaped me can be found by the patient reader.
[image]
A parade of artists – men and women, black people and white people, visual artists as well as writers and directors, all called G, are breaking in (offering a good deal of fun sleuth work for art lovers to identify the artists and their works, Louise Bourgeois’ Maman among them), conjuring up a continuous metamorphosis like in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. On the other hand the namesake G’s render the artists anonymous and hard to differentiate , their individuality merging into one abstract, archetypical Artist. Through their multitude, only distinguishing them in a few strokes, the interchangeability of the G’s acknowledges the artistic credo of one of them (in the section ‘The Spy’), bespeaking the artist’s need to erase the self a to be a good observer (of which I wondered if this is the artistic vision that Cusk takes towards her position as a writer herself):
He began to understand that the discipline of concealment yielded a rare power of observation. The spy sees more clearly and objectively than the others, because he has freed himself from need: the needs of the self in its construction by and participation in experience
While this view defies those artists who are cloak the world in their subjectivity, the aloof stance in its turn is criticized as a criminal luxury, an aesthetic and moral objection to the phenomenon of causation, a running away from an artist’s social and political responsibility:
To conceal identity is to take from the world without paying the costs of self-declaration.
The G’s seem to function as a box of instruments enabling Cusk to dissect the position and role of the artist in both their own work and in the world.
Sometimes Cusk reminds me of a Pythia intoxicated by words, regurgitating the naked truth in fumes of poison and doom. Fortunately she is also showing a dollop of clemency by presenting the grey and imperfect reality of permanent change as the best we can hope for We recognised the ugliness of change; we embraced it, the litter-filled world where truth now lay.
Reading how other reviewers are interconnecting Parade to former work of Rachel Cusk – her essays and novels and especially her The Outline Trilogy: Outline, Transit and Kudos - it was likely unwise to pick this for a first acquaintance with her fiction, nonetheless I would strongly recommend reading Parade, if only out of selfishness, awaiting with bated breath what other readers will unearth from it, particularly on the works of art Rachel Cusk wove into the fabric of her own viscerally celebral piece of art.
Coming back to this now friends have let their light shine on the novel, I strongly recommend reading Katia's stellar review and her comment thread as a companion piece to this challenging novel - her insights (as per usual) - take Cusk's novel to a level one would dearly regret missing.
A big thank you to the author, NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for granting me an ARC of this novel that will be published on 17 June 2024....more
Monsters can have children as well, but do monsters necessarily give birth to monsters? How to respond to the excruciating aThe Mercy Seat
Monsters can have children as well, but do monsters necessarily give birth to monsters? How to respond to the excruciating acts of atrocity that have been inflicted on your loved ones and kin in wartime? Revenge might be an explicable retort, emerging from a deeply ingrained primitive and natural instinct, but can it also be a legitimated one? Does settling the scores give any peace of mind? Or does vengeance only release an unbridled, never-ending cycle of retaliation?
Bearing in mind how the crimes committed by and their prosecution after the Second World War of Belgians who collaborated with the Nazi occupier still stir minds (and politics) many decades later and how little is needed to open old wounds, the context of the savagery of war put issues relating to revenge and vengeance on edge.
[image]
One fateful night marked the lives of both Nina and Tito – victim, killer and saviour in one. In the aftermath of a war in which Nina’s father is exposed as a physician faithful to the defeated regime and who is not adverse to lend them a hand in organising torture, Tito is involved into a death squad coming after him, while Tito in his turn is found by Nina fifty years later.
Structured as a diptych in which both parts enter in dialogue with each other, the first part accounts of the eventful night, soaked in violence, blood and torture. The second part in which Nina as an avenging angel reaches out to Tito shows how their lives have remained connected in ways they were only partly conscious of. Will she ultimately kill him after so many years?
She had once counted to two hundred and forty-three. She thought that now she would get up and go and see who those men were and what they wanted. If she couldn’t open the trapdoor, she would cry out, and her father would come to get her. But instead she stayed like that , lying on her side , her knees pulled up to her chest , her shoes balanced one on top of the other , her cheek feeling the cool of the earth through the rough wool of the blanket. She began to sing the song , in a thin voice . Count the clouds , the time will come.
Like Silk and Novecento, Without blood is another atmospheric and brief offering by the Italian writer and director Alessandro Baricco. It is a peculiar, gripping and thought-provoking blend of a war and morality tale on revenge, grief, love, guilt, forgiveness and mercy. Reflecting on how powerfully the past can continue to haunt someone, the reader is left perplexed by the choices which people make in extreme situations.
Thank you very much Jennifer, for tempting me to read Alessandro Baricco again. (***1/2)
Edit 24.04.24: as some reviews discern western genre elements in the first part of this novella, western, I wonder if there will be any connection between Without Blood and Baricco's new book Abel - a 'metaphysical western' - Baricco knows well how to keep his readers intrigued....more
The details opens with the narrator, who lies in bed with a fever, opening a novel in which she discovers a dedicatiAn open sky between every word
The details opens with the narrator, who lies in bed with a fever, opening a novel in which she discovers a dedication of a former lover on the flyleaf. Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy features as the Proustian madeleine, the open sesame that sends the narrator back in time, sparking memories of four people that marked her life.
[image]
Having picked this up because I was intrigued by the pieces of photographs that swirl around the covers of both the English and Dutch translations, it is striking how well those covers reflect the non-linear structure of these slices of life in which the narrator from her sickbed reflects on four relationships that have been so hugely significant in her past.
In four chapters, titled along the names of the four people, the narrator sketches four impressionistic portraits of them, not only giving a glimpse of their relationship with the narrator but also subtly, obliquely, revealing more about the narrator herself.
Relationships end, break down, or people simply vanish in a Modiano fashion from her life, culminating in a moving coda which is an ode to the only one who’s presence was not one of the narrator’s choice and for that even more significant. Unlike the common thought that loss implies losing a part of oneself, Genberg on the contrary sheds a light on the lasting imprint others make on the self and points out how crucial real openness is for true connection: I let myself be impregnated by her way of speaking and being. I let her change me forever. That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called ‘self’: traces of the people we rub up against. I loved Johanna’s words and gestures and let them become part of me, intentionally or not. I suppose that is at the core of every relationship, and the reason that in some sense no relationship ever ends.
[image]
Somehow that melancholic thought of the continuity of the traces others leave in our lives is soothing and helpful to look at loss and transience differently, loved ones who disappear from our lives not taking away a piece of ourselves with them nor diminishing our being, rather changing and enriching our existence in a myriad different ways.
[image]
Perhaps it is a shared sense of generation, of an existence from and for books, or the moments in which the precariousness of life hits, the experience of loss that render some of the narrator’s observations on her life around the turn of the millennium, the sky-high expectations of youth, the careless exaltation of party life, which reminded me uncannily of those bygone times – perhaps because they go together inevitably with the relatable, likewise experiences of the friends and loves lost.
I used to think that a sharper sense of being alive was to be found in the forest, that I would find it while sitting alone on a tree stump with the sun in my eyes, or while gazing out on the sea from some rocks on the shore; that I could only be fully awake among the silent elements. But it turned out that I already had everything right here, in the details around me, that it’s simply a question of being attentive in looking at all of it, of letting myself go and directing my attention outward, and I mean truly outward.That’s where this sharper sense of being alive is found, in the alert gaze on another.
Genberg’s gentle invitation to transcend sterile navel-gazing and turn outwards to connect with others, regardless of the inescapable feelings of pain and loss such brings, touched a chord. The flavour and the depth of her contemplative, crystalline prose makes her brief and thoughtful novel a burst of apricity, the winter sun warming the face and the mind.
She dives deep into the past, as into the depths of the sea. Ever lower, ever further, towards zones of shadow and silence that she thought had been aShe dives deep into the past, as into the depths of the sea. Ever lower, ever further, towards zones of shadow and silence that she thought had been abolished in her memory.
Elle plonge au fond du passé, comme dans les profondeurs de la mer. Toujours plus bas, plus loin, vers des zones d'ombre et de silence, qu'elle croyait abolies dans son souvenir.
This slender book consists of two novellas by Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942). A Kyiv-born novelist whose wealthy family went into exile in France after the Russian revolution, living in Paris and writing in French, Irène Némirovsky was an acclaimed author in France in the interbellum. Nowadays she is best known for Suite Française, a novel eventually published in 2004 of which the unfinished manuscript was kept in a suitcase by her daughters for more than fifty years after their mother perished in Auschwitz.
Drawn from the collection Film parlé, the novellas Ida (1934) and La comédie bourgeoise (1932) sketch a double portrait of two women whose lives at first sight come forth as quite different. Ida Sconin is an aging revue dancer and singer from Eastern European origin, performing in a music hall cabaret in Paris à la Moulin Rouge or Folies Bergère, famous and celebrated but living a lonely and isolated life, while Madeleine is the angel in the house of a prosperous upper middle class family, the daughter of a factory owner, married to the associate of her father, taking care of her parents, husband and son and daughter, living in a small community in rural northern France.
Both Ida and Madeleine deal in a similar way with the societal constraints their class, social position and gender roles impose on them. The taxing daily masquerade with heavy glitter costumes, wigs and feathers and hours of exercising to keep her body stage-fit gradually require more than Ida’s aging body can endure, even if there is no alternative but to carry on. Madeleine, trapped into a marriage of convenience, swallows the double standards on sexual freedom and conjugal fidelity for men and women for the sake of the happiness of others while seeing her life wasting away in the endless repetitiveness of the days, illustrated by her taking the same walks on the same roads in every stage of her life. Both are gritting their teeth to play their part, silently enduring and sacrificing what they hold dear, however rebelling quietly by keeping up to their own standards versus a hypocritical, merciless, and oppressive society and the indifference of their environment for their feelings.
[image]
(Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – Rousse(La Toilette), 1889))
By highlighting what these women living such different but equally unhappy lives have in common, Irène Némirovsky reveals the unenviable position of women in the early 20th century. Touching on the parallels emerging with Madeleine’s granddaughter, who just like her grandmother is bravely learning to play the piano required in every good bourgeois family – not for pleasure but to please others - she paints a rather pessimistic picture, discerning: no signs of change to expect soon in the future yet.
The melancholic tone and some of the wry turns in the lives of Ida and Madeleine bring Anton Chekhov to mind – Némirovsky wrote a biography on Chekhov that was published posthumously (A Life of Chekhov). The grittiness and the bleak portrayal of Ida’s exploitative milieu and the hypocrisy and suffocating boredom of bourgeois life stifling Madeleine echo Guy de Maupassant, particularly his novel Une vie. La comédie bourgeoise inexorably evokes Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, although Madeleine’s choices are quite unlike Emma’s. Set in the 1920s, Irène Némirovsky’s stories still seem to have one leg in the French 19th century realistic and naturalistic writing, yet they are also cinematographic and the dreamlike interior narrative of Ida slightly reminded me of La Femme de Gilles, the 1937 debut novel by Madeleine Bourdouxhe, a Belgian contemporary of Irène Némirovsky whose writing style however seemed already more in touch with modernity.
I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be. — Robert Doisneau
For someone who is in love with Paris, this collection of 560I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be. — Robert Doisneau
For someone who is in love with Paris, this collection of 560 photographs of the French photographer Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) is an absolute treat.
While I mostly associate images of nocturnal Paris with the photography of Brassaï, Doisneau’s photographs add a matutinal perspective on the city, widening the scope to street scenes in broad daylight. His exploring and documenting of Paris in black and white is often cheerful, with an eye for humour and the comical, shimmering with joie de vivre, celebrating life, love (Cosy kiss, 1950) and the beauty of Paris.
[image]
[image]
Thematically organised (Paris by surprise, Paris for Parisians (les Halles, everyday Parisians, a home for tenants, Paris-by –the-Seine) Paris in Upheaval (occupation, resistance, liberation, demonstrations), Paris at play (fairs, cabarets and nightclubs, society, fashion) Paris in concrete, the book offers enchanting vignettes from the multifarious facets everyday life in Paris, a couple of snapshots from children’s play, love, a couple of glamourous events and magnificent portraits.
Particularly with his choices on the human figure Doisneau illustrates breezingly the French national motto of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, juxtaposing casually portraits of ordinary Parisians next to photographs of personalities that might ring a bell with the reader (Charles de Gaulle, Vercors, Prévert, Francis Ponge, Raymond Queneau, Juliette Binoche, Orson Wells, Alberto Giacometti (1958), Picasso, Colette, some couturiers (Christian Lacroix, Jean-Paul Gaultier)
[image]
A couple of favourites are gems of storytelling condensed in just one image, for instance the accordionist on the cover picture or the picture of Anita, who could one of those characters with a shady past one encounters so often in the cafés and bars described by Patrick Modiano.
[image]
[image]
[image]
[image]
The photographs are accompanied by fragments from the personal notebooks of Doisneau and some of these witty comments made me smile, for instance when he recounts of loitering around and so coming late to work because he preferred to capture the poetry of a gracious moment, taking a snapshot from a street scene that he finds amusing, savouring the urban spectacle during his strolls:
“One morning I had an appointment with a clutch of advertising people who were preparing a campaign to launch new washbasins in polystyrene – or was it polyester?
As usual, I was late, and as I was crossing the Tuileries I was held up by a van marked ‘Gougeon: Fine Art Movers.’
Once I saw the statues by Maillol, the washbasins completely slipped by mind.
It must have been about that time that the advertising agency stopped returning my calls.”
[image] Venus gone bust, 1964
For half of a century I pounded the cobblestones, then asphalt, of Paris, wandering up and down the city. The few images that now rise to the surface of the flow of time, bobbing together like corks on a swirling stream, are those taken on time stolen from my employers. Breaking the rules strikes me as a vital activity, and I must say I enjoyed indulging in it. [image] Diagonal steps 1953
[image] The centaur town hall of the 6th arrondissement 1971
Charm needs to be fleeting, Doisneau reflects , but glancing through this wondrous collection, I am grateful for Doisneau’s art to stop and capture time in his photographs....more
They both stared out at the parking lot. They didn't say anything. But they seemed to feel each other's insides now, as though the worry had made themThey both stared out at the parking lot. They didn't say anything. But they seemed to feel each other's insides now, as though the worry had made them transparent in a perfectly natural way.
[image]
As soon as I started reading A Small Good Thing and recognized Ann Weiss at the bakery ordering the birthday cake decorated with a space ship for her son Scotty for next Monday morning, I realised I had read this story before - and even if I didn't want to continue because I was all too aware of what was coming, I was lost anyway, my memory hastening toward bringing it all back - the car accident, the hospital, the impotence of the doctors, the parents, the hard-working, purposeful baker, the phone calls. The begging for and make-believe reassurance, ever weaker, ever less confident, that everything will be fine and the child ok.
Yes, it is a heart-breaking story. Yes, it is even worse so the second time around.
A Small Good Thing is a powerful story touching on the fragility of life, cutting deep into the devastation of fear, guilt, grief, helplessness, pain and loneliness, showing how a shared experience of the sense of loss nevertheless connects people, ultimately thawing in some comfort coming in the shape of a simple, kind gesture that soothes the anger and the numbing pain, if only for a short time, on a moment the world seems to stand still, in a way that reminded me of the poem of Joy Harjo:
Perhaps the World Ends Here
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
He noticed a woman’s bare milk-white foot peeping out beneath the curtains of a departing palanquin. To his sharp eye, a human foot was asPerfect Skin
He noticed a woman’s bare milk-white foot peeping out beneath the curtains of a departing palanquin. To his sharp eye, a human foot was as expressive as a face. This one was sheer perfection. Exquisitely chiseled toes, nails like the iridescent shells along the shore at Enoshima, a pearl-like rounded heel, skin so lustrous that it seemed bathed in the limpid waters of a mountain spring – this, indeed, was a foot to be nourished by men’s blood, a foot to trample on their bodies.
In this fascinating and dark story Tanizaki blends Japanese traditions with his admiration for western culture. Set in the lively neighbourhood Tanizaki loved to frequent for some time, it is illuminating that the protagonist, the exceptionally skilful young tattooer Seikichi, gives up his original profession as a painter schooled in the artistic tradition of Ukiyo-e and turns to the art of the tattoo instead. The young Tanizaki wasn’t fond of Hiroshige or Utamaro prints at all, preferring western visual art, which he thought more cheering. The tattoo is a story in which he meticulously brushes a picture of his ideal woman: une belle dame sans merci, a woman who is cruel and cold, a Baudelairian femme fatale who he can fear and who enables him to fall at her feet, awestruck by her beauty and willing to be crushed by her. Tanizaki twists the Madonna-whore dichotomy in into a mother-demon one, presenting both emanations of women as erotically powerful.
[image]
[image]
Even if women in the first place seem merely aesthetic objects for Tanizaki, who looks at women’s hair and skin like they are a piece of lacquerwork, he acknowledges readily their superiority. In the Tattoo, the young woman whose back will serve as the ultimate canvas the tattooer has been hoping for to create his masterpiece discovers her true nature, which is dark and dominant - turning into the kind of dream woman to whom Tanizaki – and his protagonist – all too happily are submitting themselves, in a sadomasochist reversal of roles.
Sure, it is hard to deny that Tanizaki’s recurrent gushing over those perfect little feet strengthen his reputation as a fetishist (unsurprisingly, one of the women he married apparently had beauteous feet). Also in his story Longing the beauty of a foot entices an eulogy. Nevertheless, one can wonder about the significance of this detail and how to read it in the cultural context: does it point at an idiosyncratic fetishism or rather a culturally specific view on beauty, bearing in mind that the foot has special significance in Japan, where the traditional 'nine points' of feminine beauty include an elegant foot, as well as the line of a delicate neck rising from the back of a kimono, but remain silent on the subject of breasts. A Japanese writer praising a lovely foot might be compared to a Renaissance sonneteer admiring an ivory brow or star-bright eye ? (from The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima)
The exploration of the transformative power of art– for the better or the worse – reminded me of the short story of Marguerite Yourcenar How Wang-Fo Was Saved – and also of another story thematising metamorphosis, in which the creation turns against its creator, changing the power balance (Galatea).
This short story was my fourth foray into the work of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki after reading and enjoying his epic novel The Makioka Sisters, the three novella’s in Longing and Other Stories and his essay on Japanese aesthetics In Praise of Shadows. It is a riveting thought there is plenty more of him to read.
I lay back in the grass among fallen trees and the sun on my palm felt like a knife I could use to bleed myself dry wiMotherhood, marriage and madness
I lay back in the grass among fallen trees and the sun on my palm felt like a knife I could use to bleed myself dry with one swift cut to the jugular.
Die, my love intrigues by its title alone and Ariana Hardwick not for one single moment releases the firm grip she puts on the unsuspecting reader, masterly evoking an unfaltering tension and sense of premonition that bad and ugly things will happen - a grip so tight that she made me wish to drop the book out of fear to encounter horrific mental images I couldn’t unread and unable to stop at the same time.
In what reads as a rural anti-idyll set in the French countryside, the reader enters the mind of a woman who cannot cope with the needs of her baby because she is struggling with the terrors of mental disorder. The causes of the narrator’s mental breakdown are not revealed. Rootlessness is suggested (the mother is not French). No possible clue is given why the woman derails from reality and when such started: is it a post-partum psychosis, or did the birth of the child trigger issues that were already present but dormant? There are indications that her fragile mental condition was already there before the marriage and the child. The wrecking effect on her family is more obvious. She never wanted the child. Rage is the prevailing emotion, the relentless stream of consciousness reflects aggression, self-harm, the impossibility to distinguish hallucination from reality.
[image] (Jeannie Tomanek, A thousand cuts)
Motherhood, Adrienne Rich wrote in 1976, is the suffering of ambivalence. As far as I assume such is a thought that many can relate to, I am not sure if I would reckon Ariana Hardwick’s contribution to the debate as one that feels courageous, original or necessary in what came across as a rather run-of-the-mill attempt to demythologize the joys of motherhood and emphasize the negative effects of it on the lives of women. Sure, there are moments the narrator brings Emma Bovary (and her boredom, and escape into adultery) to mind, and her longing for a break in the company of a book instead of her baby might touch a chord, but as a view into the hell that the mind can turn into, her writing didn’t pierce me on a level that matches this thorny subject, despite her hallucinatory imagery which seems to aim at an intensity and brutality expressed in a visceral rage mixed with sexual desire which reminded me of Raduan Nassar’s A Cup of Rage.
Apparently there is a film adaptation in the making, by Martin Scorcese. Yet, just like I never had the nerve to watch Betty blue (based on the book 37°2 le matin), I think it would be wiser for me not to watch it and to read The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman instead. ...more
Trains always imply the sensation of a little travelling and train-reading holds a special pleasure, it is equally delightful as eat-reading, another Trains always imply the sensation of a little travelling and train-reading holds a special pleasure, it is equally delightful as eat-reading, another undervalued form of pleasure that rarely wells up when one is asked about the highest bodily pleasure between heaven and hell. That hell can also be one's own mind, as in this dark story by Sien Volders, in which a young man's inner compass fails and confusion strikes mercilessly.
A train journey to the dreamed-of northern lights leads to the cold and desolation of the Orkney Islands. The savage landscapes and mysterious Neolithic stones pound on the young man with a dislocating force. Understanding expressions of human warmth, help and compassion cannot prevent him from being swallowed up by the inner darkness that torments him.
Sien Volders manages to capture the tragedy and loneliness of mental illness in a gripping, convincing and sensitive way.
Dark is life, dark is death.
[image] [image] (Jeanne Bouza Rose)
De trein is altijd een beetje reizen en treinlezen een bijzonder genoegen, al net zo heerlijk als eetlezen, een andere onvolprezen vorm van genot die zelden opwelt wanneer gevraagd wordt naar het hoogste lichamelijke genot tussen hemel en hel. Die hel kan ook het eigen hoofd zijn, zoals in dit donkere verhaal van Sien Volders, waarin het innerlijke kompas van een jonge man het laat afweten en de verwarring genadeloos toeslaat.
Een treinreis naar het gedroomde noorderlicht voert naar de koude en verlatenheid van de Orkney eilanden. De woeste landschappen en mysterieuze neolithische stenen beuken met een ontregelende kracht op de jonge man in. Begripvolle blijken van menselijke warmte, hulp en medeleven kunnen niet beletten dat hij wordt opgeslokt door het innerlijke duister dat hem kwelt.
Volders weet de tragiek en de eenzaamheid van geestesziekte op een aangrijpende, overtuigende en gevoelvolle manier te vatten, in poëtische contrasten van stilstand en beweging, licht en donker, warmte en koude.
Donker is het leven, donker is de dood. (*** ½)...more
What if women take over power – in both the public and the private sphere?
[image]
Written in one afternoon in 1905 (!) by the BLadyland Wonderland
What if women take over power – in both the public and the private sphere?
[image]
Written in one afternoon in 1905 (!) by the Bengali feminist and social reformer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), Sultana’s dream is a colourful, sweet and funny utopian feminist science fiction story with a fairylike feel.
Observing the seclusion brought upon her by purdah, Sultana drifts into a reverie of reversal of gender roles that gives birth to a heart-shaped paradise in which violence, war, sins and prisons vanish, fuelled by female ingenuity and solar energy. Like lions in a cage, it are the men that are kept indoors while women rule, which brings quite a few changes in society, no longer dependent on physical strength but thriving on wisdom and brain power and eco-friendly technology.
[image]
We do not covet other people's land, we do not fight for a piece of diamond though it may be a thousand-fold brighter than the Koh-i-Noor, nor do we grudge a ruler his Peacock Throne. We dive deep into the ocean of knowledge and try to find out the precious gems, which nature has kept in store for us. We enjoy nature's gifts as much as we can.
Your dexterous little piece brought it to them gently but clearly, Begum Rokeya – social and religious customs that restrict intellectual freedom and development benefit nor the individual nor society.
The story can be read here. More of Chitra Ganesh’s 27 linocut prints inspired by this remarkable story can be found here....more
Is love a state of mind, a state of being, a phenomenon, a congeniality that disappears right before our The yearning for what is beyond our reach
Is love a state of mind, a state of being, a phenomenon, a congeniality that disappears right before our eyes into the past, into the backwaters of history?. Love is what Beatriz, the female protagonist in Coetzee’s new novel The Pole wonders about.
Whatever might be the answer, is there is anything else but love that we never seem to tire talking or reading about? It seems only right that Coetzee in his eighties doesn’t waste time and choses to thematise and explore what feels essential to existence, the mysteries of love and connection.
Beatriz, a banker’s wife in her late forties who is wrapped up in a withered marriage and charity works, becomes the object of veneration - almost obsession - of the Polish pianist Witold Walczykiewicz who she is expected to entertain as a host before and after the piano recital her circle organises in Barcelona. He is seventy-two, tall, extravagantly white-haired, massive, once famous as a Chopin interpreter. She isn’t particularly charmed by his measured, unsentimental interpretation of the preludes of Chopin – she prefers the warmer, epic view of Chopin by Claudio Arrau and misses the feeling of rapture she has come to expect of Chopin- nor is she much impressed by Witold’s personality or appearance. Nevertheless she grows intrigued when he seeks to stay in contact with her. One thing leads to another and an uncommon relationship unfolds between them, riddled by questions and doubts and with even a joint stay in Mallorca – another one of the many echoes to Chopin (and George Sand).
[image] (silhouette of Chopin by F. Phillip)
Coetzee focusses mostly on the feelings and thoughts of Beatriz who seems to determine the terms and conditions of the relationship – at least at first sight. She seems common sense impersonated, wondering why her thoughts keep turning to the Pole and reflecting on her own motifs and what she can possibly mean to him – unlike his views on Chopin’s music, a sturdy, taciturn dreamer.
What follows isn’t a romantic tale on infatuation or late in life passion, nor a run-of-the-mill story on adultery. Witold ascribes Beatriz a more lofty role, reminiscent of Dante’s Beatrice (‘Do you remember the poet Dante Alighieri? His Beatrice never gave him a single word and he spent his life loving her’). Does she agree? Is she just a muse to him? Coetzee doesn’t suggest any communion of souls, nor touches on the power of art and music to bring people together. Both are writing their own story. Coetzee explores the relationship between Beatriz and Witold to gauge the human condition and deficiency. Because they don’t speak each other’s language and can only communicate in a shared foreign tongue, Beatriz is permanently aware of the risk of possibly misunderstanding each other, of not reading each other correctly – the need of translation turns both into a leitmotif and metaphor for human communication which is inevitably flawed.
Oscillating between passion and rationality Coetzee’s pared-down, subtle tale conveys masterfully a universal, timeless longing for beauty and grace.
Our beloved remains as unreachable and unfathomable and unknowable as we are to ourselves. (**** ½)...more
I am not sure whether Peter Englund’s bold statement that you probably will never have read a book on the Second World War quite like this one is corrI am not sure whether Peter Englund’s bold statement that you probably will never have read a book on the Second World War quite like this one is correct, but it is certainly rings true for this non-expert reader, as I haven’t come across such a compulsively readable, compound-eyed and kaleidoscopic account on the course of the Second World War through the eyes of a wide range of people who experienced the events themselves before. I burnt through the almost 600 pages in just a couple of days. An English translation of this book will be published in November 2023.
Based on fragments of the diaries, testimonies, memoirs and letters of 39 individuals directly affected by or involved in them, the world-wide events in the crucial month of November 1942 are stitched together from week to week.
The book starts with a photo album of the dramatis personae whom the reader will meet and ends with an overview of what became of them during or after the war– unsurprisingly fate has not been merciful to all of them.
[image] (Hélène Berr)
Englund lets their experiences speak from themselves without further ado, analysis nor explication, evoking the sense of the moment as it must have been experienced by them, still unsure of the outcome, living in uncertainty, having only limited information. Some names will ring a bell because the reader might be familiar with their writing (Helène Berr, Lidiya Ginzburg, Vera Brittain, Vasily Grossman, Ernst Jünger, Keith Douglas, Albert Camus) –and/or because their fate is well-known (Sophie (and Hans) Scholl).
Englund takes the reader from Berlin to Bandung, from Brussels and Paris to Mandalay, Egypt, Stalingrad, Poland and Leningrad following the military at the various fronts on land, air and water (a military doctor, a British bomber; a Finnish foot soldier at the Svir front; an American pilot in Guadalcanal, a Japanese imperial army naval commander, infantrymen at both sides at the Eastern front,, a partisan in the forests of Belarus) and also journalists, a Korean ‘comfort woman’ in a Japanese brothel in Mandalay; a prisoner of Treblinka, housewives on Long Island and Barrow-in-Furness, a member of the resistance in Brussels and a 12 year old Jewish girl who fled to Shanghai with her family.
Interspersed with the experiences from the selected individuals are threads on the making of the film Casablanca, the building of the first nuclear reactor in Chicago (as a step to the Manhattan project), life on the U-boat 604 and shipbuilding of a Liberty ship under the Emergency Shipbuilding program.
[image] (November 8th, 1942 operation torch)
Pointing at El Alamein, Guadalcanal, operation Torch in North-Africa and the encirclement of the tth Army at Stalingrad, Englund’s key premise that the thirty days of November 1942 effectively were a turning point in the second world war, is persuasive. His point of view also echoes what I remember from reading Herman van Goethem’s 1942: Het jaar van de stilte - in which he brings forth the diary of a museum director understanding the tipping of the balance from the radio news and links the changing attitude from the Belgian government in exile, no longer believing in a negotiated compromise peace, to the international events: only in November 1942, El Alamein showing that the Germans weren’t invincible, the government distanced itself clearly from the policy of administrative collaboration with the occupation force, by making clear to which extent local administrators would be punished after the war.
[image] (Allied troops taking cover at El Alamein)
Obviously, focussing on the emotions and experiences of these individuals makes this book a poignant read. There seemed no limits to the suffering human beings could inflict upon each other in this war. In the face of such boundless suffering, words and comprehension fall short. In his prologue, Peter Englund appositely quotes Primo Levi that those who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless. The rest is silence and remembrance, perhaps through the lasting words of poets:
[image]
Canoe
Well, I am thinking this may be my last summer, but cannot lose even a part of pleasure in the old-fashioned art of idleness. I cannot stand aghast at whatever doom hovers in the background; while grass and buildings and the somnolent river who know they are allowed to last for ever, exchange between them the whole subdued sound of this hot time. What sudden fearful fate can deter my shade wandering next year from a return? Whistle and I will hear and come another evening, when this boat travels with you alone towards Iffley: as you lie looking up for thunder again, this cool touch does not betoken rain; it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly.
Een porno pastiche die zich afspeelt in een Franse commune annex trainingskamp waarin vrouwen technieken leren om dDe veellagigheid van de cliteratuur
Een porno pastiche die zich afspeelt in een Franse commune annex trainingskamp waarin vrouwen technieken leren om de orgasmekloof te dichten, uitmondend in een kerstorgie en een bekentenisbrief aan de geliefde waarin het geleerde wordt veruitwendigd? Wat Bregje Hofstede met de maand december associeert spoort duidelijk niet helemaal met de gebruikelijke zoete kerstromantiek.
[image] (Debra Hall)
Hoewel ik me afvraag of porno op zich vaak al niet zweemt naar pastiche, zijn de begintafereeltjes behoorlijk grappig. Hofstede trekt het instructieve kantje van haar verkenning van de vrouwelijke genotsanatomie mooi door met een link naar het leren vouwen van een origami vulva. Wanneer de vertelster zich overgeeft aan een briefmonoloog om haar verlangens lik na lik uitvoerig te visualiseren, treft vooral de schrijnende tristesse die schuilt in haar woorden: Wat ik wil is niet mijn moedertaal. Wat hij wil is het eerste waar ik naar leerde raden.
Werkelijke openhartigheid en het uitspreken van al dan niet intieme verlangens blijft moeilijk en lastig, omdat we onszelf hiermee blootgeven op een meer ingrijpende manier dan we enkel met ons naakte lijf zouden kunnen. Is het de angst onszelf bloot te stellen aan afwijzing, of misschien spot? Het is veelzeggend dat zelfs een bij uitstek talig wezen als de vertelster met dit gegeven worstelt....more
Loading...
