Adam > Books: favourites‎ (83)

He grasped the mike, pressed Record, and as the tape began to roll he stayed still for a moment with his mouth open and his face hardened as it had been in the early afternoon in the bathtub.

“I made a mistake,” he said abruptly. “Leftist terrorism and State terrorism, even if their motivations cannot be compared, are the two jaws of . . .”

He hesitated.

“. . . of the same mug’s game,” he concluded, and went on right away: “The regime defends itself, naturally, against terrorism. But the system does not defend itself against it. It encourages it and publicizes it. The desperado is a commodity, an exchange value, a model of behavior like a cop or a female saint. The State’s dream is a horrific, triumphant finale to an absolutely general civil war to the death between cohorts of cops and mercenaries on the one hand and nihilistic armed groups on the other. This vision is the trap laid for rebels, and I fell into it. And I won’t be the last. And that pisses me off in the worst way.”

The Catalan stared into the shadows and mechanically rubbed his mouth with his hand. He had a vision of his father, whom he had never seen. The man was on a barricade, or more precisely in the process of stepping over it, with one leg up in the air; it was the evening of May 4, 1937, in Barcelona, and the revolutionary proletariat had risen against the bourgeoisie and the Stalinists. In a fraction of a second a bullet was going to strike Buenaventura’s father, and in a fraction of a second he would be dead, while in a few days the Barcelona Commune would be crushed and very soon its memory would be buried in calumny.

“The condemnation of terrorism,” Buenaventura said into the mike, “is not a condemnation of insurrection but a call to insurrection.”

He interrupted himself once more, and a snicker twisted his lips.

“Consequently,” he added, “I pronounce the Nada group dissolved.”

He stopped recording.

“And with unanimous support yet again!” he shouted in the darkness. “The old traditions must be respected.”

He took the cassette from the recorder, thrust it into another envelope, which he closed and on which he wrote: First and Last Theoretical Contribution of Buenaventura Diaz to His Own History.

The old French epic fragment known today as Gormont et Isembart contains an imaginative account of the victory won by the French under the leadership of King Louis III over an army of Northmen at Saucourt-en-Viemeu on August 3, 881. In the poem, whose authorship is unknown but, which is considered to be one of the earliest chansons de geste to have survived in its written form, King Louis is presented as Charlemagne's own son, Louis the Pious, while his pagan adversary King Gormont can be readily identified the Viking King Gudrum, who founded the English Danelaw. The central character of the accidental fragment, however, and almost certainly of the entire original poem, the renegade Christian knight Sir Isembart, is impossible to identify with any historical prototype. His name does not appear in any 9th-century Carolingian manuscript.

The fragment opens in the melee of the final battle where, until his death some 400 lines later, the narrative is dominated by the personality and deeds of the Pagan King Gormont. Without devoting a single line to physical description, the poet succeeds in presenting him as one of the genre’s most frighteningly impressive opponents of Christianity, through the extraordinary and brutal valour of his actions and through the venom of his every word. In a succession of single combats he withstands, on foot, a series of mounted charges by the knights of France. The originality of this maneuver is matched by that stinging war-boasts (or gabs), which comprise racial and religious insults, heavy sarcasms, ironic gibes, and a range of witty wordplay unmatched in any other surviving full-length epic verse-tale of medieval France. The combats themselves are described in varied but precise detail––despite its brevity Gormont and Isembart employs a military vocabulary as rich as that of any other chanson de geste.

With Gormont's death (line 395), the narrative structure of the poem changes as the poet explores and exploits dramatic and lyric possibilities inherent in the personality of his most original character, the anti-hero Isembart. Having revolted against his liege lord, King Louis, forsaken his homeland and abjured his Christian faith (hence his sobriquet of ‘The Renegade’ in the poem), he has entered the service of the Pagan king and persuaded him to conquer France. At Gormont’s death, he then becomes the leader of the Pagan’s demoralized forces. The poet’s skill lies now in his ability to convincingly move his audience from a sense of outrage to a feeling of pity, and then finally to an approbation of Isembart’s morality and actions on personal, national and religious levels. Our disapproval of his original revocation of fealty is tempered by Isembart’s touching lament at his benefactor’s death, and by his gallant leadership of a doomed and disrespectful rabble. Our affront at his attack upon fellow Frenchman is softened by his own admission of their superiority, and our revulsion at his attack upon his own father is immediately quelled by the poet’s deft explanation of its unwillingness. Finally, the audience’s most enduring antipathy––that engendered by his treacherous desertion of the Christian faith––is transformed abruptly into a sense of heartfelt loss at Isembart’s death. He confesses his sins, and dies indeed as an almost Christlike figure. Cut down unrecognized by four of his countrymen, he forgives them for all––and, for all, is himself forgiven.

the lens of an authentic ancient Greek or Shakespearean

the lens of an authentic ancient Greek or Shakespearean tragedy in which characters, neither good nor bad, are overtaken by the unintended consequences of their conception of what they ought to do. I suspect that I have come closer to succeeding in this task in the case of those people whom I found fascinating and rather less so in the case of those whose banality numbed my senses. For this I find it hard to apologize, not least because to present them otherwise would be to diminish the historical accuracy of this account.

But Alexis saw Merkel’s behaviour differently. When she intervened before 20 February, his negative expectations resulted in euphoric surprise. Then, with his expectations raised, Merkel was at liberty to dash them at will, causing Alexis to sink into the depths of misery. She used this capacity to toy with Alexis, lifting his spirits, depressing them and raising them again as it suited her. I did my best to weaken her influence over my prime minister with my own analysis of her behaviour, arguing that the only way to secure a decent agreement was to ensure she was constantly aware that we were not afraid to press the Off button. But it was not working. By April I sensed that Alexis had succumbed to the chancellor’s spell.

Half an hour later my phone rang again. It was Jeff, laughing uncontrollably. ‘You will not believe this, Yanis,’ he said. ‘Five minutes after we hung up, I received a call from the [US] National Security Council. They asked me if I thought you meant what you’d said! I told them that you did mean it and that, if they want to avert a default to the IMF, they’d better knock some sense into the Europeans.’
I had fully expected my phone to be tapped, but two things made Jeff ’s news remarkable. First, the eavesdroppers not only had the capacity to recognize that what I had said was of real significance but they must also have had an open line to the NSC. Second, they had no compunction whatsoever about revealing they were tapping my phone!