Books Reviews
~ Cont. ~
​​
Eastbound (2012) by Maylis de Kerangal, trans. Jessica Moore (2023)
Born in Le Havre, France, in 1967, Maylis de Kerangal became a full-time writer after publication of her first novel, Je marche sous un ciel de traîne, in 2000. Two of her award-winning novels have been translated into several languages: Birth of a Bridge (Naissance d’un Pont, 2010), which won the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis, and Mend the Living (Réparer les vivants, trans. Jessica Moore, 2014), also in English as The Heart (trans. Sam Taylor, 2016), which claimed the Prix Orange du Livre, among other prizes, and was adapted into the film Heal the Living (2016).
In 2023, Archipelago Books, a non-profit press that publishes English translations of classical and contemporary literature, released Jessica Moore’s translation of Kerangal’s Eastbound (2012). Though only 127 pages in 6” x 5” format, Eastbound was included on both The New York Times and New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023 lists.
The setting of Eastbound is a train across Siberia. The story, simple but spellbinding, is told by two characters and a narrator. Aliocha is a 20-year-old Russian military draftee who decides to desert before reaching training camp. Hélène, a 30-something French woman, who is on the train after making a spur-of-the-moment decision to leave her Russian lover, Anton, makes another spontaneous decision to assist Aliocha.
There are more than 100 conscripts on the train, unsure of their ultimate destination. They are “…letting their arms dangle, their feet dangle, letting their bored resignation dangle in the void.” (p.3) Conscripts try to get exemptions through their mothers begging, bribery, or getting a woman pregnant, but Aliocha has no mother, no money, and is a virgin. He’s scared of going to Siberia, “a territory of banishment… Nothing here is on the human scale…” (pp. 9-10) He thinks: “Run away.” (p. 13) Although he’s strongly built, two other soldiers pick a fight, bruising him and bloodying his nose, marking him as a victim.
Two female train attendants, one in Aliocha’s military car and one in Hélène’s passenger car, have important supporting roles. Train attendants in Russia are held in high regard, feared, and envied. They move across borders, “trafficked all there is to traffic, using the extraordinary privilege of being able to move around while everyone else remained still…” That was so in the Soviet period and continues today.
On the platform at a train stop, Aliocha follows a foreign woman, Hélène, toward her passenger car, but sees his sergeant, Letchov, angrily talking on his phone and soldiers patrolling. Returning to his military car, Aliocha “feels trapped in a backwash of terror and cold rage…” (p. 31)
Later, unable to sleep, Hélène, walks the moving train, reaching Aliocha’s compartment. They stand, smoking, at the window, unable to communicate well because of the language barrier. “[W]e will never know why they remain this way, not speaking, not touching, she should have left long ago …” (pp. 39-40)
When dawn breaks, Hélène begins to leave but Aliocha stops her, embarrassed by his own forcefulness. He speaks “an astonishing flow of words, trembling of the lips…” She doesn’t understand his dialect but realizes the meaning. She says, “Follow me.” (p 44) After reaching Hélène’s compartment, Aliocha falls asleep on the bunk. Hélène is now overwhelmed by what’s she’s done but knows there’s no turning back.
While Eastbound often has wonderfully descriptive language and apt turns of phrase, there are occasional jarring notes. Hélène remembers waiting in an auto for Anton on a rainy day and how the glass fogged up “by her own carbon dioxide” inside and “thousands of microscopic droplets” outside. (p. 52) Whether the translator or author is responsible for such ineloquence is not clear. Certainly, though, an editor should have intervened in the needlessly lengthy comparison of Anton to famous Russians: “He is … Tchaikovsky … Trotsky … Chekov.” Similarly, there’s more than a page of her prior “jumbled montage” view of Russia: “…Brezhnev’s eyebrows and Solzhenitsyn’s beard … Nureyev leaping …” (pp. 59)
However, that section is easily skimmed and once back on board the present, Eastbound speeds in suspense as Aliocha has another failed attempt to depart, Hélène’s frustration mounts, and Sergeant Letchov orders the train searched. A train attendant attempts to assist Aliocha who is hiding in the washroom. As soldiers approach, she mops the floor in front of the washrooms, “creating … an impassible zone, a border river … as she scrubs she speaks to them from her shore, occupying time as much as she occupies space.” (pp. 102-103). But Letchov has not surrendered, and the outcome is tensely uncertain. All of this is well told in an exciting denouement, more emotionally powerful for the silent interaction of the characters. Eastbound could make an excellent, Hitchcockian movie.
Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (2002)
Set in the Pacific Northwest in the early-20th century, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams follows the lonely life of lumberman Robert Grainier. Told in starkly beautiful prose, Train Dreams is a sad tale laced with humor and memorable throughout.
The novella opens dramatically in 1917 as Grainier watches railroad workers attempt to toss a Chinese laborer accused of theft over the trestle into the rapids below. The man breaks free, cursing the men as he flees. “Walking home in the falling dark, Grainier almost met the Chinaman everywhere … road … wood… dancing up out of the creek like a spider.” (p. 7) He was “baffled by the violence, at how it had carried him away …” (p. 8) Yet, in fear, he wished they’d kill the man before he cursed them.
At home, his wife, Gladys, and infant daughter, Kate, are sick in bed. “In the dark he felt his daughter’s eyes turned on him like a cornered brute’s. … All of his life Robert Grainier was able to recall this very moment …” (p. 9) When the reason for this foreshadowing is revealed, it is fantastical.
The chronological development of the story is interspersed with events from Grainier’s past and future. After the death of his parents, he was raised by elder cousins, who told him different stories about his background—French Canadian or Utahan Mormon—but he was never curious enough to learn the truth. He didn’t marry until he was 30 years old, having met Gladys at his cousin’s Methodist church.
Grainer is away from home for months on a lumbering job as a choker who looped the timbers with cable. Nature’s majestic beauty and power are a major theme of the book. “He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away” and the sense of protection from the trees. But an old sawyer, Arn Peebles, said the trees were killers. A good sawyer can judge the fall 99 times but the 100th could kill him. “It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.” (pp. 14-15) There will be deaths from work accidents and a flu epidemic.
In 1920, returning from another lumbering job, there is a fire in the Moyea Valley of Idaho where Grainier’s home is. Questioning people to locate his wife and daughter, “…he grew increasingly frantic as he witnessed the refugees’ strange happiness at having got out alive and their apparent disinterest in the fate of anyone who failed to.” (p. 40) Covering his nose and mouth with a wet handkerchief, he walks 20 miles home, but the area is deserted. Farther north he “hear[s] the roar of the conflagration and see[s] the fire a half mile ahead like a black-and-red curtain draped from a night sky. Even from this distance, the heat stopped him.” He collapses to his knees “and wept.” (p. 42)
Grainier realizes his wife and daughter must be dead, but sometimes thinks they had escaped. When able to return to his homestead, “his heart’s sorrow blackened and purified.” (p. 44) A few families began returning by spring and he’s surprised that he does, too. Grainier builds a cabin where his home had been and tries to rebuild his life.
Later, he begins dreaming and sensing the presence of his wife, Gladys, who broadcasts her feelings. “Before his sight she was living again her last moments.” (p. 77) He is perplexed by the indication that his daughter, Kate, survived. The truth is revealed—or is it?—as the story continues through his long life into the 1960s.
Denis Johnson (1949-2017) was a poet, novelist, and short-story writer who struggled with addiction. He won the National Book Award for Tree of Smoke (2007), about Vietnam, military intelligence, and espionage, and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Tree of Smoke and Train Dreams (2002). His short-story collection, Jesus’ Son, about murder and petty crimes, was the basis for a 1999 movie.
Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó (1963), trans. By George Szirtes (2014)
Several years ago, I enjoyed reading Magda Szabó’s The Door (1987) when it was republished to much acclaim by the New York Review of Books (2015) in an excellent translation by Len Rix. The novel deals with the complex relationship between an educated writer and her odd, illiterate housekeeper who allows no one into her own home.
Reading Szabó’s Iza’s Ballad (1963), in George Szirtes’s also excellent translation (2014), confirms my admiration for Szabó’s literary skill and psychological insight into human character and relationships. Like The Door, Iza’s Ballad focuses on two very different women: Iza, a talented physician with modern ideas, and her mother, who has lived a simple, sheltered life. Tellingly, the mother is called the Old Woman until near the end of novel when readers learn her name is Etel.
Set in Hungary in 1960, with excursions into the main characters’ pasts, the book opens when the mother is toasting bread in wood stove instead of a toaster because “[s]he didn’t trust machines…” (p. 3) Her husband, Vince Szócs, is dying of cancer. Years earlier, Vince, a county judge, had issued a not-guilty verdict against “four worthless peasants” (p. 51), resulting in the government firing him and family and acquaintances ostracizing the couple. It was their determined daughter, Iza, who gained Vince official rehabilitation from the government 23 years later.
Iza and her husband, Antal, had lived with her parents until the young couple divorced and Iza moved to Pest. When Vince dies, his wife walks home from the clinic: “The park looked exposed, almost angry, as if it were being dragooned into spring against its will … March … was severe, the sky clouded over, edgy and dark … the buds … not dreamy but threatening … a kind of purplish green, like rotting flesh.” (pp. 16-17) She wonders what she will do with herself. But Iza had arrived to take charge and insists that her mother live with her in Pest.
Iza had been “a serious, wise, grown-up sort of child” (p. 31), and she now tells her mother not to cry about Vince’s death. When Antal arrives, he and Iza are courteous to each other, as always. While living with the Szócs, they had never quarreled and simply announced one day that they were separating with no reason given. Readers will understand the reason by the end of the book. Antal, who loved the Szócs as the parents he never really had, offers to move in with Mrs. Szócs, but Iza says her mother is moving in with her. Antal and Iza look each other in the eye.
After the funeral, Iza sends her mother to a spa for a few days of rest and relaxation. Meanwhile, Iza oversees the packing for Pest, knowing what would fit and look best in her flat. “Iza was right, of course, she always was …” (p. 57) While at the spa, Mrs. Szócs imagines furnishing Iza’s apartment and cooking for her, but in Pest Iza has a housekeeper, Teréz, and tells her mother not to work. Iza had placed Vince’s chair, reupholstered, in her mother’s room, having gotten rid of most other pieces from the old house.
In her professional life, Iza wanted to know the whole person of each patient. She was an “outstanding diagnostician” who cured more patients than her colleagues. (p. 122) Yet she fails to do that with her mother. Iza and her mother love each other, but their difficulty understanding each other impedes their attempts to do the best for the other and makes adjustment to living together burdensome. Antal, though, recognizes his former mother-in-law has the same intelligence, good temper, and work appetite as Iza, despite apparent differences.
The mother-daughter relationship is also strained by Etel’s distrust of the housekeeper and of modern appliances and city ways. Iza thought about “[t]he problem of her mother.” (p. 124) When Iza had visited her mother in her hometown, “it was possible to smile at the old woman’s instinctive feudalism … but up close it was impossible … the old woman irritated her.” (p. 131)
With little to do at Iza’s flat or in Pest, her mother grew frustrated, feeling there was “nobody who really depended on her for kindness or even conversation.” (p. 149) She returns to her village for a visit and ends up staying with Antal, who has purchased her old house. Although he had updated it, she recognizes the old under the new. She had left Pest in anger, but once home, she feels ashamed of her behavior at Iza’s. “How dreadful it must have been for you. How awful.” (p. 257)
Antal is now engaged to Lidia, who had nursed Vince at the clinic. She initially feared Antal would compare her to Iza, whom she had once revered. But Lidia now sees that is not so. She concludes that Iza must be “exhausted … with the constant self-discipline, the need not only to save her family but the whole world. … The poor woman [Iza] believes that old people’s pasts are the enemy. She has failed to notice how those pasts are explanations and values, the key to the present.’” (p. 315)
After tragedy strikes, Iza’s boyfriend, Domokos, looks at her, “crestfallen, faced with the wreck of her good intensions.” (p. 299)
Magda Szabó (1917–2007) was born into a Protestant family in Debrecen, Hungary, and was taught by her father to speak Latin, English, French, and German. After graduating from the University of Debrecen, she became a teacher of Latin and Hungarian, and in 1947 married Tibor Szobotka, a writer and translator. She published two poetry collections, Lamb (1947) and Return to Man (1949). A literary award for Lamb was revoked in 1949 by Hungary’s Communist government, which then refused to publish her work until 1956.
In 1958, Szabó published her first novel, Fresco, and a young adult novel, Tell Sally. The next year, she won the József Attila Prize for literary excellence, which she would win again in 1972, and the Kossuth Award in 1978. Her most widely read book is Abigail (1970), about a girl (Gina) at a boarding school during World War Two. Her novel The Door (1987) was awarded in 2003 the Prix Femina Étranger, given to the best foreign-language novel in France, and when published in the United States in 2015 was named one of the year’s ten best by The New York Times. Other novels include The Fawn (1959) and Katalin Street (1969), both republished by the New York Review of Books (2023, 2018), the latter winning the PEN translation prize for Len Rix. Szabó was also the author of plays, short stories, children’s verse, and nonfiction.
Partitions by Amit Majmuder (2011)
Amit Majmudar’s Partitions is a beautifully written tale, heartrending at times, yet hopeful that goodness and love can persevere amid senseless death, destruction, and mass dislocation. The novel mixes gritty realism with the supernatural. It is set in 1947 when former British India is being divided into Muslim-dominant Pakistan and Hindu-dominant India. The result was massive resettlement of peoples, fierce sectarian violence, and refugee crises.
Partitions follows three stories—of six-year-old twins Keshav and Shankar, who are Hindu; of Dr. Ibrahim Masud, a Muslim; and a young teenage girl, Simran, a Sikh—whose lives will eventually intersect. The narrator is the ghost of the twins’ father, whose incorporeality allows him to accompany them all, interspersing their particular experiences into a convincing panoramic whole.
The book opens with Keshav and Shankar getting separated from their mother, Sonia, while boarding a crowded train for India as they leave their hometown in the newly designated Pakistan. Seeing their mother pulled from the train as it moves away, the twins jump to join her. In the fall, Shankar breaks three ribs and Keshav cuts his head. They are unable to find their mother in the mass of people. “Keshav squints over the crowd … The ocean, though made of people, is lonely.” (p. 32)
Readers meet Dr. Masud as he flees his burning house at the same time the twins are falling from the train. He had previously diagnosed Shankar’s heart disease. A middle-aged bachelor, Dr. Masud’s patients are a mix of Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim, and his stutter eased only when talking with children. He is an innocent of the ways of the world, and not until his house burns does he comprehend being Muslim is how he will now be identified. When Masud finds his medical clinic ransacked, his Sikh errand-runner urges him to leave because of Sikh retaliations for Muslim atrocities against Sikh women elsewhere. Masud realizes: “He must go. He has nowhere to go. He must go.” (p. 27)
Simran Kaur, “barely fifteen,” (p. 34), is the eldest of five children of a Sikh family. The women, girls, and young son are sequestered in a room, while the men of the family decide to kill them with morphine after hearing of Muslim atrocities. “Die now … [as] Sikhs, intact, pure.” (p. 37) Simran, however, pours her morphine-laced milk out the window and escapes. After wandering, she returns to her village, finding the bodies of her family in a row, covered with sheets. She sleeps by her deceased mother. As Simran departs the next morning, the villagers leave her unmolested, thinking she is a ghost.
The youthful innocence of the twins and Simran make them vulnerable to exploitation. For the twins, it is being sold as “sons” to a middle-aged widow desperate for children. “The boys watch, not understanding, in spite of what they overheard.” (p. 77) Once they realize the situation, Shankar tricks the woman and they slip away. Later, Keshav will face immolation from bloodthirsty Hindu men who think he’s Muslim. For Simran, it is capture by men planning to sell her into prostitution. One of the men says the real money “is in girls. In girls, he phrases it, the way a businessman might say in rice or in shipping or in gold.” (p. 94)
As Dr. Masud walks with an injured foot to the border, he provides medical care for other refugees, lancing abscesses or setting fractures with sticks. He is followed by a group of orphans, who, seeing his kindness, protect and assist him. They ask a farmer to take Masud on his cart. The farmer resists at first but their “explanation stopped him short … he saw how tenderly the children preserved this old man… The sight of kindness reminded him of a lost golden past, before the invention of borders, when kindness was possible. Prehistory just last year.” (p. 137)
The paths of the four main characters eventually merge. Dr. Masud, senses, “as he did before, a detached kindness guiding the courses and intersections of people, which violent men … disrupt … only for a time.” (p. 196)
Author Amit Majmudar is amazingly productive and multitalented. He has published three collections of his awarding-winning poetry: 0°, 0° (2009), Dothead (2016), and What He Did in Solitary (2020), and was the first Poet Laureate of Ohio. His Sitayana (2019) is a retelling of the Hindu myth of Ramayana, his The Book of Vows (2023) is the first of a trilogy retelling the Mahabharata myth, and he translated Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (2018).
Malmudar’s fiction includes two novels about the 1947 partition of India, Partitions (2011) and The Map and The Scissors (2022), Soar (2020) about Indian soldiers in World War One, and The Abundance (2013) a consideration of contemporary Indian-American life. His non-fiction includes Twin A: A Memoir (2023), a prose and verse memoir of his son’s battle with congenital heart disease. Black Avatar and Other Essays (2023) is a collection of his thoughts on the religious history, philosophy, and mythology of India.
Majmudar accomplishes all this writing while working as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and raising three children with his wife, A. B. Majmudar, author of the young adult novel, The Torchbearers (2020). On August 17, 2023, he was interviewed by Slant Books.
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (1943), trans. by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe (2016)
Sabahattin Ali (1907-1948) was born in the Ottoman Empire in what is now Ardino, Bulgaria. After graduating from the School of Education in Istanbul (1926) he studied in Germany (1928-30), then returned to Turkey to teach German. Owner-editor of a satirical newspaper, Marko pasa, which often ran afoul of government censors, he was imprisoned twice. In 1948, he was killed while attempting to flee Turkey at the Bulgarian border. For more information on the author, see translator Maureen Freely’s article in the May 21, 2016, issue of The Guardian.
Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat (1943; 2016) is a short novel about one man’s love for a woman that possesses his life to the near exclusion of all else. With the painting referenced in the title being crucial to the love story, the protagonist, Hatip zade Raif, comments on changing art styles of the early 20th-century. The story also presents interesting glimpses of a modernizing Turkey and Weimar Berlin.
The first part of the novel is narrated by a young colleague of Raif Efendi (he uses the traditional title “Efendi” rather than “Mister”). The elder man is an excellent translator of German for a company in Istanbul, but no one at the firm gives Raif credit for his eloquent, accurate translations. He is described as “rather ordinary (p. 1) … this gray-haired, stubby-faced man with tortoiseshell glasses…” (p. 10) Yet he will haunt the narrator’s thoughts.
Sharing an office, the narrator tries to befriend Raif, but the man works mainly in silence and was often absent. At first, the narrator feels “Despair of this tiresome blank of a man…” (p. 14) Noticing a lovely drawing of Raif’s sparks the narrator’s intense, but often frustrated, interest. “The closer I got to him, the more puzzles he threw in my path.” (p. 18)
When Raif is ill, the narrator visits his house to take him a document for translation. Raif lives with his wife, children, and in-laws, most of whom treat him discourteously. Although the narrator is only 25, he found odd the new habit of young people staring at strangers out of blatant curiosity. He concludes that they aren’t bad, but “had nothing, absolutely nothing, inside… It was the yawning void inside them that drove them to deride, scorn, and ridicule others, for this was their only source of satisfaction, their only way of knowing who they were.” (p. 24)
Over time, Raif become friendlier to the narrator but remains mysterious. The older man’s illness worsens and, knowing death was approaching, he agrees to allow the narrator to read his diary. The book then shifts to Raif’s youth.
At age 18, Raif was drafted into the Ottoman army, but the armistice ending World War One occurred before he saw active duty. He then briefly attends Istanbul’s Academy of Fine Arts, but his intensely shy personality prompts him to give up painting after realizing it is a mode of self-expression.
At his father’s suggestion, Raif moves in 1923 to Germany, where the postwar inflation meant foreigners could live comfortably because their currency buys more. His father wants him to work in the soap industry, but Raif desires to learn German and read European books. The first few weeks are a struggle. “I had yet to learn that nothing in this world can ever match the marvels that we conjure up in our own minds.” (p. 56)
In his apartment building, Raif learns German from a retired officer who knew some Turkish, along with help from the talkative apartment manager. The three other residents take him under their wing: Dutch widow Frau van Tiedemann, Portuguese orange-importer Herr Camera, and elderly Herr Döppke who had done business in Cameroon. Foreshadowing the rise of Fascism, Döppke goes to political meetings and returns with unemployed officers who believe only a strong man (i.e., dictator) can save Germany. Raif tires of the political discussions at the dinner table. Each had an idea of how to save Germany, but all the ideas “were tied to personal interests.” (p. 57)
Although postwar Germany did not live up to his expectations, Raif’s life is enriched by the Old Masters’ paintings at the museums. He found the new art style to be a “mode of self-promotion alien and distasteful.” (p. 60) Nevertheless, he goes to an exhibition of contemporary art. He found most of the pieces, by Cubists and other modernists, laughable, but he sees a portrait of a woman in a fur coat that transfixes him. It was a self-portrait of Maria Puder. He later reads about her interest in following the great masters. Critics compare her self-portrait to Andrea del Sarto’s “Madonna delle Arpie” [Madonna of the Harpies]. Raif returns daily to see the Madonna in a Fur Coat yet has “overwhelming fear” of meeting the artist (p. 65) because his instinct is to run away from attractive women.
One evening, Raif sees Maria on the street and follows her to the Atlantic cabaret, where she is a singer. This shocks him, assuming she must be “a common coquette…” (p. 79) But when she sings songs of longing, “Oh, how my heart ached!” (p. 80) Maria, who had observed him in the gallery, now sees him in the audience and smiles at him, “open, pure, and genuine.”
After the show, Maria suggests to Raif that since they are both alone in Berlin they should become friends. But she is firm that the relationship should not develop further. After several bad experiences, she hates men because they ask so much of women. “They are hunters … and we their miserable prey.” Women are expected “to bow down and obey…” (p. 95) Although see does not sense male pride in Raif, she is not sure. She wants to be swept off her feet by a man without being controlled or degraded.
Her art, painting, is the most important thing Maria does, but she doesn’t want to earn her living as a painter because then she would be doing what others’ want.
Maria tells Raif not to pity her: “To pity another is to assume superiority, and that is why we must never think we are superior to others, or that others are more unfortunate…” (pp. 109-110) Raif says they “are at the same place but on different roads: we are both are looking for someone.” (p. 117) He agrees they should “allow our friendship to take its natural course.” (p. 118) Not to decide in advance. She responds that he is not such a child as she had assumed.
Maria says that while friendship is “built on understanding” (p. 128), love defies analysis. He responds that love is all-consuming and can’t be resisted. Raif wanted to protect this intimacy of their friendship but was fearful of losing it through action or inaction.
The rest of the novel follows their developing relationship, with its exhilarations and tragic missed connections. “The pain of losing something precious … can be forgotten over time. But our missed opportunities never leave us, we ache.” (p. 183) Later in life, Raif understands “The greatest betrayal … is to abandon a loving heart …” (pp. 194-195)
​
​
Remembering Babylon by David Malouf (1993)
From Queensland, Australia, son of a Lebanese-Christian father and English-Jewish mother, David Malouf (b. 1934) is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer as well as a poet, playwright, and opera librettist. His first poetry collection, Bicycle and Other Poems, was published in 1970 and his first novel, the semi-autobiographical Johnno, in 1975.
Malouf’s novel The Great World (1990), about two Australian prisoners of the Japanese during World War II, won the Best Book award from the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger for best book translated into French. Remembering Babylon (1993) won the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (1996), the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. In 2008, his Collected Stories (2007) won the Australia-Asia Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award.
Set in a Scottish borderland settlement of Queensland, Australia, c. 1860s, Remembering Babylon is a novel about belonging and displacement—of the immigrant Scots, the native people, and the mysterious central character, Gemmy Fairley.
It opens dramatically when three settler children—Lachlan Beattie and his cousins Janet and Meg McIvor—see “something extraordinary”: a black man running toward them. (p. 1) Twelve-year-old Lachlan holds up a stick as if it’s a gun, prompting the man’s response, “Do not shoot … I am a B-b-british object!” (p. 3) They realize the man is white, though with scorch marks on his skin, a missing eyebrow, swollen joints, and one leg shorter than the other.
The news spreads quickly in the small settlement and residents try to determine who this “black white man” is and where he came from. (p. 9) Despite being British, his English is very limited, though he begins to remember more words. His name sounds like Gemmy (or Jimmy) Fairley (or Farrelly), and he’d been cast overboard 16 years before when he was about Lachlan’s age and had been living with natives in the northern bush ever since.
To learn more details, Gemmy is interviewed the next afternoon by Mr. Frazer, the sympathetic minister, with George Abbot, the 19-year-old schoolteacher, as reluctant scribe. Mr. Frazer was given to speculation and Gemmy seemed to be trying to please him. Abbot occasionally altered the statement: “The imp of invention … this scrap of mistruth … among so much … mere guesswork on the minister’s part … appealed to his [Abbot’s] sense of the absurd…” (p. 17)
Taken in by the McIvors, Gemmy sleeps in the lean-to and helps the father, Jock, with farm chores. Gemmy is a willing worker, though not strong. He feels a bond with the children who found him, teaching them skills like plaiting grass and Lachlan how to track animals, while playing pupil to the girls. Lachlan felt an obligation to Gemmy and wanted to include the stranger in his boyish plans for exploration.
For other settlers, however, Gemmy, with his native mannerisms and accent, make real their fear of a native attack. What if he was a spy, many wondered. Jock, although uneasy himself, plays down his neighbors’ fears. “It was the mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness that made Gemmy Fairley so disturbing to them … and the encounter was an embrace.” (pp. 38-39)
Ned Corcoran says the only way to deal with natives is to get rid of them. Some, however, thought the natives could become workers or servants, perhaps on plantations. Gemmy “felt a heavy responsibility.” To the hardliners who wanted to make him an ally for an easy war, he inflated the number of natives and placed them farther north than was the case. To those wanting to enserf the natives, he refused to give information, feigning ignorance of their questions.
The exception was Mr. Frazer, to whom Gemmy was trustful and more open. Frazer, an amateur botanist since childhood, would draw native plants and write down what Gemmy called them. Although the minister’s pronunciation of the native language was often bad, sometimes unwittingly humorous or blasphemous, his drawings showed he understood the spirit of the plants.
​
Frazer becomes an advocate of cultivating native plants rather than importing European ones. “We have been wrong to see their continent as hostile and infelicitous…” (p. 118) He writes, “…no continent lies outside God’s bounty and his intention to provide for his children. He is a gardener… The children of this land were made for it, as it was for them. … We must humble ourselves and learn from them.” (p. 119) He sees Gemmy as a forerunner, if a crude one, “…a true child of this place…” (p. 121)
Readers are given backstories of key characters. Ellen McIvor was from a Scottish mining family and, determined to leave that life, had married Jock, a gardener. After immigrating to Australia, their first two children died, and Ellen realized the sunniness she’d seen in Jock was not his true nature. Unlike Ellen, he was often homesick, though he never said so. When her favorite brother, Rob, died in a mining accident, his young son Lachlan was sent to live with them.
Schoolteacher George Abbott had also been uprooted. When he was a boy, his father died, and a godfather had paid for his education. After finishing his degree, he wanted to move to Africa to experience an arduous life, but his godfather countered with Australia. Once there, George “fought with his loneliness, his youth, and his sensual nature …” (p. 40) He considered his life “in this godforsaken place … desolate and without hope.” (p. 46) His attitude toward Gemmy changes profoundly over time.
Gradually, readers are given glimpses of Gemmy’s grim youth. Abandoned on the street as a child, he worked in a timber mill sweeping the sawdust from under the machines. He was then taken in by Willett, a ratcatcher, who gave him “curses, blows, growls, slobbery kisses.” (p. 134) Gemmy helped Willett remove rats from the ponds of London’s Regents Park, which were used in weekend rat matches. Gemmy received many wounds that became open sores and scars.
After a spontaneous act of retribution, Gemmy stowed aboard a ship, working as a cabin boy for two or three years. Again a victim of abuse, he cast himself off the ship and was found washed ashore by a group of native women and children. “Lying half in salt and … half in air that blistered. Eyelids so puffed … Nostrils crusted … All over him … tiny creatures … crawled into the cracks that had been opened in him…” (p. 20) The natives nursed him to health and he followed them. “He was accepted by the tribe but guardedly … proper to an in-between creature.” (p. 25)
The settlement’s mysterious Mrs. Hutchence lives with a younger woman, Leona Gonzales, in a real house that has real furniture. “It was like stepping back into a dream place…” (p. 78) George Abbott discovers that the McIvor girls and Hector Gosper gather there for kitchen-table conversation, with Gemmy in silent attendance. Janet McIvor, the eldest, will find her life’s passion when she begins assisting Mrs. Hutchence with beekeeping. One of the novel’s major symbolic episodes involves Janet and the bees.
When two natives briefly visit Gemmy, they are seen by Andy McKillop, a farm worker, with his own unfortunate past. When Gemmy refuses to explain the encounter, Andy is personally offended as well as angry. He quickly spreads the news, elaborating what happened: “He was inspired.” (p. 91) This confirms suspicions and exacerbates fears, which culminate in violence. “And the stone, once launched, had a life of its own. It flew in all direction … [to] leave wounds … [that] would not heal.” (p. 93)
After the unfolding of that watershed event and its impact on various characters and the community over several chapters, the final chapter leaps fifty years to the early post-World War One era. Lachlan and Janet, now elderly, reconnect after years apart and realize: “Something Gemmy had touched in them was … still living…” (p. 180)
The story and characters of Remembering Babylon have the substance for a longer saga, which author Malouf has refined to an eloquent essence.
​
Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah (1994)
The author of ten novels, Abdulrazak Gurnah (b. 1948) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. His books affirm the ability of the human spirit to survive in disruptive or devastating situations. Major themes include refugee displacement, the immigrant experience, and colonialism. In an interview with The New York Times, however, he resisted the idea that “a writer represents [others] … I represent me. … When I speak … if you hear an echo in your own experience, that’s great.”
From Zanzibar, the son of a fisherman, Gurnah saw the aftermath of the overthrow of Zanzibar’s largely Arab government in 1964 and subsequent violent reprisals against those of Arab or Indian heritage. Seeing no future in his homeland, he and his brother immigrated to England, where they experienced racial abuse for the first time. Yet, he says the period may seem tragic in reflection but was exciting at the time. In 1982, he earned a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Kent, where he would teach for more than 30 years.
Gurnah published his first novel, Memory of Departure, in 1987. Paradise (1994) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize and recommended for the Big Jubilee Read in honor of the 70th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign. By the Sea (2001) was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Time Book Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize. Desertion (2005) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His latest novel is Afterlives (2020), which depicts the divisive effects of German colonialism in Tanzania. His books have been translated into 38 languages.
Paradise is set in German East Africa during a time of expanding colonialism on the eve of World War One. While Europeans play a pivotal role at two key junctures and are looming in the background throughout, the novel focuses on the interactions of Africans—Arab, Indian, and Black. Part coming-of-age story and part adventure, it follows a boy, Yusuf, pledged into debt peonage. His experiences have parallels to the Genesis story of Joseph: being sold into slavery by his family, disturbed by dreams, and falsely accused of attempted rape.
Paradise opens with a starkly beautiful evocation of place:
… it was the season of drought, when every day was the same as the last. Unexpected flowers bloomed and died. Strange insects scuttled from under rocks and writhed to their deaths in the burning light. The sun made distant trees tremble in the air and made the houses shudder and heave for breath. Clouds of dust puffed up at every tramping footfall and a hard-edged stillness lay over the daylight hours. (p. 1)
Yusuf, aged 12, is sent suddenly on a trip with “Uncle” Aziz, a prosperous merchant who leads selling expeditions into the African interior. Unknown to the boy at first, his failed businessman father is deeply in debt to Aziz, so Yusuf is collateral until the debts are paid. He learns the truth from Khalil, the teenage manager of Aziz’s store.
Khalil treats Yusuf as a younger brother, and they live together in an outbuilding. Khalil will eventually tell his own heartbreaking tale of how he arrived there. He is very deferential, arguably sycophantic, to Aziz and dedicated to the store, where he laughs and jokes with customers. While assisting there, Yusuf’s beauty is admired by the female customers, especially Ma Ajuza who calls him her husband.
When possible, Yusuf spends time in the beautiful walled garden, helping the elderly gardener tend the fragrant trees and bushes. He realizes there are women sequestered in Aziz’s house. Khalil says it is Aziz’s wife, who is rich and ill, allowing no visitors except for a few female relatives. Mirrors were installed so she could see the garden without leaving the house. She becomes enamored with Yusuf’s beauty and his tender care of the garden, believing he has a healing touch. Khalil orders him to ask no questions and never enter the house.
After two years pass, Aziz unexpectedly tells Yusuf he will join the next selling trip into the interior. The expedition overseer is Mohammed Abdalla, whom Khalil calls a demon. With a tall, muscular physique and “scowling, snarling looks,” Mohammed’s pitiless “eyes promised nothing but pain to any who crossed him.” He also had “a reputation as a merciless sodomizer…” (p. 46)
Despite his trepidation, Yusuf enjoys traveling with the guards and porters, enthralled by their “endless stories and uncouth jokes” (p. 63) However, at the first caravan stop up the mountain, Aziz says Yusuf will stay with the shop owner, Hamid Suleiman, to assist in the shop, serve the family, and sometimes care for the three children. Hamid and his wife, Mombasa, are genial and treat Yusuf as family, but give him “irritable words and sharp looks” if he isn’t prompt. (p. 69)
Many traders passed through and if they are coastal, Arab, or Somali, stay at Hamid’s house for a day or two. They spoke with amazement of the Europeans, “awed by their ferocity and ruthlessness.” (p. 72) The traders believed the Europeans’ spit was poisonous and they could be killed only by striking them under the left armpit, which was difficult because of heavy armor. The travelers reported, more accurately, that Aziz’s expedition was doing good business.
Yusuf joins Hamid on his annual selling trip up the mountain slope in a ramshackle van hired and driven by Harbans Singh, nicknamed Kalasinga. Hamid, a Muslim, and Kalasinga, a Sikh, are good friends who argue and banter humorously. They sometimes fling ethnoreligious slurs at each other in their conversational sparring.
When the three rest in the upper foothills, Yusuf finds a waterfall, cold from mountain ice, amid verdant giant ferns, banana trees, and bamboos. He is awed by the place’s “air of secrecy and magic… (p. 76) He later tells Khalil it felt like eternity, “as if everything was complete. I have never seen anything as beautiful as that. You could hear God breathing.” (p. 180)
As usual, Hamid stayed at storeowner Hussein’s house. Kalasinga and Hussein disagree over the likely impact of the Europeans. Hussein says they want the whole world and will crush everyone else. Kalasinga says they’ll leave Africa because, unlike his native India, it’s uncivilized. One must “learn how to cope with them.” They agree, however, that Hamid should watch out for his “crooked partner,” Aziz. (p.88)
Upon returning home, Hamid and his wife are shocked to realize that Yusuf can’t read, so send him to the Koran school with their children. Although he felt it was an indignity, he did well with guidance from the kind Imam. Meanwhile, Kalasinga teaches Yusuf the English alphabet and mechanics while telling tales of gods, saints, and battles. In the evenings, Yusuf serves Hamid and his friends, listening to their stories. One spoke of an uncle who went to Russia, where the sun shone at midnight and the ice was thick. He was surprised by the many Muslims there but judged the Russians less civilized than the Germans.
A year after Aziz’s previous trip, he arrives at Hamid’s with a new, larger expedition into the interior, which Yusuf will join. Mohammed Abdulla, now injured, is less imposing and is assisted by “Simba” (Lion) Mwene, who will eventually dominate. Mohammed takes Yusuf under his wing and tells him of the impressive European ships and houses, but remarks that the people “look like skinless reptiles …” (p. 121) He says the Europeans are in Africa for the same reason they are: to make a profit.
As the expedition journeys deeper into the continent (the middle third of the book), Yusuf has many adventures. What he sees is often astounding, like the green light of the mountains, but sometimes unsettling, such as a village after an enemy attack. At each stop, Aziz must pay tribute gifts, sometime exorbitant, and Yusuf joins the small group delivering them, gaining knowledge of the delicate negotiations. Unlike the previous expedition, this one is beset by trouble, and they return home in rags. However, Aziz praises Yusuf for having matured well, saying it’s time he took a wife.
In the final third of the book, “The Grove of Desire,” the interest of Aziz’s wife, Zulekha, with Yusuf grows into an obsession. She believes he is an angel sent by God to do good. At her request, but against Khalil’s strident warnings, Yusuf begins visiting the house to pray for Zulekha’s recovery. There, he meets her young companion, Amina, and experiences “the joy of secret love.” (p. 215) His visits will precipitate, as Khalil predicted, a crisis within the household.
As the novel closes, Yusuf makes a spontaneous, momentous decision. Was it the best one? Read and discuss.
In Paradise, Gurnah has created memorable characters and an engaging story that opens vistas and experiences unfamiliar to many readers. After finishing the novel, I promptly purchased Gurnah’s By the Sea and After Lives, eager to read more of his work.
A Whispered Name by William Brodrick (2008)
As a young man, author William Brodrick joined the Augustinian Friars before leaving the religious order six years later to become a lawyer. Father Anselm, the main character in Brodrick’s first series of mysteries, was a lawyer who became a Catholic monk. The success of the first novel, The Sixth Lamentation (1999), allowed Brodrick to retire from legal practice and become a full-time writer. A Whispered Name (2008), the third novel in the series, won the Gold Dagger Award from the Crime Writers’ Association of the United Kingdom in 2009.
A Whispered Name soars above the average mystery novel by its polished prose, intricate plotting, and moral seriousness. As the author explains, “…it is a parable of how a man found meaning in death, and how another—on seeing that—found faith in life.” (p. 344) Chapters alternate between the late-20th century and World War One (1914-17).
A Whispered Name opens when Father Anselm, the beekeeper at Larkwood Priory, notices a woman at the grave of Fr. Herbert Moore and an elderly man weeping in the background. The woman, Kate Seymour, tells Fr. Anselm that Moore had been part of a court martial of Private Joseph Flanagan, an Irish volunteer in the British Army during World War One. They want to understand the special meaning of the trial. Moore had been their last hope.
Fr. Anselm is surprised to learn of Fr. Herbert’s wartime service since the monk had not mentioned it to anyone (it seemed) during his sixty years at the priory. Fr. Sylvester, Herbert’s best friend, says the woman is mistaken. But the Prior, Fr. Andrew, says there’s no mistake that Herbert served in World War One. His corpse had a war wound, there was a military law book in his room, and he was wearing ID tags of a Private Owen Doyle. Previously, Fr. Herbert had expressed his desire to see Joseph Flanagan and tell him to feel no remorse or guilt.
The Prior gives Fr. Anselm his blessing to solve the mysteries of the court martial, Flanagan, and Doyle. The investigation is particularly important to Fr. Anselm because of the role Fr. Herbert played in Anselm becoming a monk. He had first visited Larkwood Priory on a school retreat where he received a leaflet written by Fr. Herbert that stayed with him through schools and his law career. When Anselm was 30, he met Fr. Herbert when helping get the monk’s car out of a ditch. He asked what Fr. Herbert did at the Priory, and the priest responded, “We tend a fire that won’t go out.” (p. 21) Two years later, Anselm decided to enter the same order.
Fr. Anselm’s investigation is hampered by Kate Seymour’s business card having been lost. It’s assumed she’s the daughter of Joseph Flanagan, who is assumed to have been the old man weeping at the cemetery. It is arranged for Fr. Anselm to visit the Public Records Office where military specialist Martin Reid is familiar with the Flanagan file.
Reid says the trial was an anomaly. Only papers of executed soldiers are kept, so the existence of the file indicates that was Flanagan’s fate, yet records of the process and outcome are missing, including no death certificate. No one knows what happened. The trial is also distinctive because it occurred during a lull in the battle of Passchendaele, one of the deadliest campaigns of World War One.
When readers meet the young Captain Herbert Moore he has awakened on a battlefield after a shell hit and is trying to save a fellow soldier from sinking to slow death in the mud. It is an incident that will haunt Herbert into his last years. While Herbert is recovering from his wound, he’s ordered to return for duty to serve as the third officer of a court martial. Three being required for a death sentence.
As the story of the trial unfolds, details about Herbert and Joseph Flanagan’s backgrounds emerges. When Herbert’s father read that Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914 involved Serbs, he asked, “Who in the blazes are they?” (p. 44) Herbert volunteered for duty with a Cumberland regiment to which his family had long ties but was expelled for a reason not clarified at first. His family then moved to Northumberland so he could serve in that regiment.
Joseph Flanagan (Seosamh [SHOH-suff] Ó Flannagáin) was from a small island (fictional Inisdúr) west of the Irish mainland where his family had lived for generations. From his teacher, Drennan, Joseph learned about the wider world and the English language. “In a way … it was a betrayal without treachery. A turning away from my father’s soil…” (p. 126)
Drennan was a devout Irish nationalist but disappointed in Ireland, so he’d come to Inisdúr to find “Celtic purity…” (p. 145) However, the Islanders did not think of themselves as Irish, identifying only with the island and their families. Joseph wanted to break out of island ways, at least temporarily. So, against the wishes of his father but with the secret blessing of his mother, he went to England to work. When the Great War began, he volunteered for the Northumberland regiment.
Joseph Flanagan served faithfully for three years on the battlefields of the Western Front without taking home leave. (This was the time of the Easter Rising and its aftermath.) In June 1917, after helping bury more than two thousand soldiers, he witnessed the massive mine explosion at the Battle of Messines that killed thousands of Germans, burying many alive.
On August 26, 1917, Flanagan was charged with desertion. As ordered, he had taken a wounded officer to the reserve trenches for medical care, then upon returning to the line he met Private Owen Doyle, a stranger to him. Both soldiers allegedly deserted to the French coast, being stopped by military police before escaping. Flanagan was apprehended on August 27, away from the coast but three miles behind the line. Doyle was listed as killed in action on September 15. During the trial, Flanagan refuses to defend or explain his actions.
Investigating decades later, Fr. Anselm tries to learn if and (if so) why both men deserted, why Flanagan did not defend himself, how Doyle could have been listed as killed-in-action though not listed as returning for duty, who Doyle was, why Fr. Herbert was wearing his ID tags, whether the death sentence was carried out, and if so, who was executed, and who Kate Seymour and her elderly companion are. The meticulously plotted story will keep readers guessing.
More significantly, A Whispered Name conveys with solemn sympathy the difficult moral decisions made in wartime for those on the battlefield and those tasked to judge the actions of their fellow soldiers, as well as the impact on the loved ones of the soldiers and the gulf that separates them from those who served. As the story develops, there is an underlying Christian motif of substitutionary atonement. The novel is emotionally powerful to the last page.
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (2012)
Born in Penang, Malaysia, in 1972, author Tan Twan Eng is a descendent of Chinese settlers to the British Straits Colony (“Straits Chinese”) like his main character in The Garden of Evening Mists (2012), Teoh Yun Ling. After receiving his law degree from the University of London, Tan worked in Kuala Lumpur as an intellectual properties lawyer until becoming a full-time writer.
Tan’s first novel, The Gift of Rain (2007), which I would also recommend, was longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize, and the novel under review, The Garden of Evening Mists, won the Man Asian Literary Prize (2012) and the Walter Scott Prize for History Fiction (2013) and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (2012) and the Dublin IMPAC Prize (2014). It was adapted into a film in 2019. His third novel, The House of Doors, was published in 2023.
Both The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists are based on the Japanese occupation of Malaysia during World War Two. One of the author’s talents is to create complex characters who make difficult decisions in severe circumstances, such as a POW camp, without sliding into moral equivalency or relativism. All the main characters have interesting stories that allow readers to view events from various perspectives.
When readers meet Teoh Yun Ling, the central character of The Garden of Evening Mists, it is 1987 and she is retiring earlier than expected as Malaya’s Chief Justice. This is because a disease—"this trespasser in my brain” (p. 295) — is eroding her ability to understand language and she wants to write down her past experiences before they are lost.
Memory is an important theme in the novel. It is for Yun Ling not only in dealing with her disease but also in confronting her wartime experiences. “Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.” (p. 294) Other characters, too, carry the weight of memories.
Before her judicial appointment, Yun Ling had worked as a public prosecutor and earlier as a researcher for the War Crimes Tribunal. During World War Two, she and her older sister, Yun Hong, had been interned in a secret Japanese slave-labor camp. Yun Ling was the only camp survivor and her incentive for joining the post-war Tribunal was to find information about the camp’s exact location.
After being fired in 1951 for criticizing the Allies for not requiring reparations from Japan, Yun Ling, traveled up the mountains to the tea estate of her friend Magnus Pretorius, a Dutch South African (Boer) and former business partner of her father. Magnus had arranged for her to meet his neighbor Nakamura Aritomo, former gardener to the Japanese emperor, to commission him to create a Japanese garden in honor of her late sister.
Yun Hong had fallen in love with Kyoto’s gardens when the family visited Japan before the war, and her memories of them sustained her spirit in the internment camp, where she was forced into sex slavery. Aritomo’s garden, Yigiri (Evening Mists), is the only Japanese garden in Malaya. Although he refuses the commission, he offers to teach Yun Ling how to create the garden, telling her not to take notes: “The garden will remember it for you.” (p. 84)
The Garden of Evening Mists alternates mainly between the period of Yun Ling learning the art of Japanese gardening in 1951 and her return 36 years later to renovate Aritomo’s garden, which had been neglected since his mysterious disappearance and presumed death. There are also flashbacks to Yun Ling’s youth and eventually the story of her internment—with its “unpredictable cruelties” (p. 80)—and escape is revealed. Readers also learn the past of other characters.
The novel’s pivotal relationship is between Yun Ling and Aritomo about whom she must first overcome her revulsion toward a Japanese man. His family had been imperial gardeners for generations, but in the 1930s he was fired after a design dispute with the emperor’s cousin-in-law. Aritomo then moved to British Malaya, where he bought land from Magnus whom he had met in Japan.
Magnus had been a POW during the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and when Japan invaded Malaya in 1941, he, his Chinese wife, Emily, and their servants were interned on his estate to work the fields. Aritomo was beaten by the Japanese occupiers but released after two months and seemed to remain aloof from the occupation. But did he?
Yun Ling’s description of her and sister Yun Hong’s experience in the Japanese slave-labor camp is particularly harrowing. Yun Hong was forced into prostitution, while Yun Ling worked in the kitchen before compelled to join other prisoners in 18-hour workdays repairing a collapsed mineshaft. “Each day was unchanging, differentiated only … by who had been injured, who had fallen ill, who had died.” (p. 254)
Yun Ling describes atrocities against prisoners, such as an Australian private beaten and then forced into a box in which he could neither sit nor stand. After two days, he went insane and was shot. Yun Ling is eventually made a translator for a visiting dignitary, Tominaga Noburu who loves gardening and mentions knowing Aritomo, whom Yun Ling had heard of from her sister.
When Yun Ling began her work with Aritomo in 1951, Malaya was in a state of emergency (1948-1960) because of a Communist insurgency. Security was heightened when the British High Commissioner is assassinated, and Yun Ling is a potential target because her work as public prosecutor had involved sentencing and deporting Communists. She will also be asked to fill the dangerous role of liaison between surrendering Communists and the police.
Magnus’ nephew, Frederik, is a captain in the Rhodesian African Rifles stationed in Malaya to suppress the Communist insurgency. He falls in love with Yun Ling and becomes jealous of her developing relationship with Aritomo.
As riveting as these stories are, readers of The Garden of Evening Mists also learn about four types of Japanese art: gardening, archery (kyudo), ukiyo-e printmaking, and tattooing (including full-body horimono).
Japanese garden design arose 1000 years ago, influenced initially by Chinese temple gardens, then developing its own aesthetic based on the Japanese landscape and stricter asceticism. Yun Ling found its concept of emptiness appealing in opening “the possibility of ridding myself of everything I had seen and heard and lived through.” (p. 81)
When Aritomo had turned 18, in preparation for becoming an imperial gardener, his father gave him a sketchbook and money for a six-month journey across Honshu (Japan’s main island) to learn by observing nature. “Nature is the best teacher.” (p. 209) His father said, “The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of men.” (p. 144) Aritomo eventually became “a master of shakkei, the art of Borrowed Scenery, taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral to his creation.” (p. 25)
At Yun Ling’s request, Aritomo also teaches her Japanese archery (kyudo) in which the archer must learn to breathe properly and concentrate on each ritualized movement. The purpose is to train the mind. The “song of the bowstring” when the arrow is released is called tsurune. Aritomo explains, “Anything beautiful should be given a name … The purer the tsurune, the greater the archer’s skills.” (p. 136)
When Yun Ling returns to Aritomo’s estate in the 1980s, Professor Yoshikawa Tatsuji arrives to request her permission to use Aritomo’s woodblocks for a book he is writing about Aritomo, who was a respected ukiyo-e artist. Although Aritomo’s style had been traditional Japanese, the images were of Malaya.
The professor also insists, to Yun Ling’s initial denial, that Aritomo was a tattoo artist, pointing out the close link in Japan between woodblock art and tattoos. Both were inspired by a Chinese novel, Suikoden (“Water Margin”), which was translated into Japanese in the 18th century and became very popular.
Besides his scholarship, Professor Yoshikawa is known for insisting that Japan take responsibility for its wartime atrocities, a view for which he had been criticized and even beaten. During the war, he had been a pilot for the Japanese Imperial Navy. He tells Yun Ling of the “rabbit hunting”—clubbing to death—of POWs by Japanese troops and supporters, implying his own complicity. He tells her of witnessing his father’s ritual suicide (seppuku), volunteering for Kamikaze duty, and the loss of his lover.
Throughout The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan’s graceful prose is adorned with inspired similes and metaphors:
“Sparrows rise from the grass into the trees, like fallen leaves returning to their branches.” (p. 15)
When Yun Ling first enters Aritomo’s house, she senses its silence has a different quality and feels as if she “had been plumbed … into a deeper, denser level of the ocean. I stood there, allowing the stillness to seep into me.” Hearing a bird’s whistle outside only “deepen[ed] the emptiness of the air between each note.” (p. 44)
While Aritomo discusses his past, “A memory wisped across his face, like rain drifting over a mountain.” (p. 140)
During her evening walks, Yun Ling sees bats flying and wonders if humans are the same: “navigating our lives by the silences between words spoken…” (p. 307)
The Garden of Evening Mists takes readers on an enlightening journey to the past suffused with beauty and pathos.
Schlump by Hans Herbert Grimm (1928), trans. by Jamie Bulloch (2015)
Schlump begins as a lighthearted romp about a teenage boy who joins the German Army at the beginning of World War One to meet girls. When he finally gets to the trenches of the Western Front it turns deadly serious.
Mixing horror and mordant humor, the novel is a strong indictment of German participation in the war, not only in its depiction of the terrible conditions in the trenches, but also in mentioning shortages, famine, labor unrest, friendly fire, dereliction of duty, desertion, and insubordination. Particularly criticized are military and civilian leaders who live well while others fight and starve. Absent is any reference to national glory or duty to the Fatherland, except by a fanatic character near the end. It’s no wonder that the Nazis banned the book.
Emil Schultz is 16 years old when the Great War begins in 1914. He thinks only of girls and war, romanticizing a soldiers’ life. The “top dog” and class joker at school (p. 5), he acquires the nickname “Schlump” from a policeman trying to collar him for creating a disturbance in the marketplace. Whatever the officer meant to say—“shrimp, scamp, scallywag…”—the name stuck. (p. 6)
When he turns 17, Schlump volunteers for the German infantry and reports for duty in August 1915. Proving skilled with a rifle, he enjoys shooting target heads and is eager for action. However, because he speaks French, Schlump is soon assigned to administer three French villages, a proud accomplishment at his young age. Punctual and efficient, he has “mountains of reports to complete” for a military layered with administrators “organized down to the minutest detail.” (p. 26) He deals kindly with the locals and flirts with the young women. It is only distant cannon fire that reminds him there is a war.
Schlump is then ordered to march to Carvin (Fr.), where he finds his quarters in a cellar reeking with the “nauseating stench of people, leather, and wet rot…” (p. 67) He and other recruits drill and dig trenches, being amazed to see shrapnel, which “whizzed through the air … a tiny, fiery red tongue—and exploded with a sharp plink.” (p. 72) When “a shell exploded nearby … the fragments hissed … like a thousand cats … like cursed souls.” (p. 73)
On the way to his next assignment, Schlump sees the “debris of wrecked houses” and realizes if a shell explodes, “there’s nothing you can do, you’re helpless.” (p. 83) He’s stationed at the third line of the Western Front but part of a group that rotates up to the second, with two days between shifts playing cards and drinking schnapps. In the latrine when a mortar falls, he’s at first “hypnotized like a chicken spellbound by a snake.” (p. 94) He flees but wakes in the hospital bunker suffering a minor head wound and is sent to a military hospital in Germany.
After his recovery, Schlump returns to the reserve battalion of his regiment, but knew few men because of the large number killed at the Somme in 1916. His duty is six-day rotations on the front line, the third line, then rest: “it was thrilling and deadening at the same time.” When his friend Willy is killed, the other men squabble over his things. “Comradeship was thin on the ground because these men barely knew each other and hadn’t yet the benefit of shared experience.” (p. 108)
In the “constant filth” (p. 127) of the trenches, it is freezing cold with limited rations and nothing to eat for two days. Schlump “felt unhappy for the first time in his life … [and] for the first time started thinking seriously about himself and the world … But it didn’t last long.” (p. 121)
After a vividly described British offensive with “everywhere blood and more blood” (p. 134), Schlump is hit during a German counterattack and sees his comrade Michel grab a British soldier and explode a grenade between them. Michel’s head rolls: “Eyes wide open, it looks over at Schlump, appearing as if trying to smile.” (p. 136) In great pain, Schlump crawls over corpses and hears “[a] nightingale … pouring out every ounce of joy from its tiny heart… as if … love and happiness really did still exist…” (p. 139) He loses consciousness and is taken to a hospital, where the surgeon is unable to remove a shrapnel splinter in his shoulder.
Schlump is eventually transferred to a military hospital in his hometown. He notes with disdain, “There were plenty of others who were yet to risk their lives … hospital inspectors, paymasters, and other plump gentlemen with officer insignia on their epaulettes.” (p. 163.) He hears a patient say he is feigning insanity and another appendix problems. Schlump is sent to a convalescent company with “all manner of cripples, a horrific gallery of deformities in field-grey uniforms.” (p. 174) Two were insane but the asylum was filled.
Schlump is then assigned to non-combat duty at the rear echelon headquarters. On the way, a railman tells of “the terrible famine at home” (p. 189) and of the German government, to prevent a strike, placing railway laborers in the army under martial law with even less pay. Once ensconced at the exchange bureau, Schlump observes that everyone is involved in the black market.
Schlump also sees “clean, well-fed rear-echelon officers pass by with their shining gaiters, casually and elegantly greeting the poor wounded who leaned humbly against the walls.” (p. 202) He thought of his old teacher, a Franco-Prussian War veteran, who had said leaders should be role models. “The prosperity or despair of a nation depends on the moral conduct of its leaders. … And woe betide a nation whose leaders refuse to make greater sacrifices than the rank-and-file man.” (p. 203)
After Russia withdrew from the war in early 1918, there was renewed enthusiasm among German troops. Schlump concludes that even if Germany won, the trench soldiers would not get honors, which would go, instead, to the officers “in sparkling uniforms.” (p. 210)
When the German offensive stalls, a long march of the wounded began, and Schlump realizes they’ve lost the war. He befriends a wounded lieutenant, Eger, who tells him about a mustard attack on the military hospital. With the burning hospital lighting the way “[l]ike a gigantic torch…” a march began of a few thousand wounded—“a grisly, ghostly procession”—that ended with only a few hundred survivors. (pp. 217-218)
The German attempts to regain the momentum all failed. “The brave infantrymen gained considerable ground. But back-up was lacking. This major enterprise had been ill thought…” and many died. (p. 231)
Near the end, a delusional reserve officer, Gack, is introduced to ridicule the ultra-nationalism which would burgeon in post-war Germany culminating in the Nazi state. Gack says the individual is nothing and has no soul, only the nation does. The “honour and greatness of your people is everything.” In the face of all evidence, Gack insists Germany will win and unite Europe under a leader with “a superhuman soul.” (pp. 241-242).
Author Hans Herbert Grimm (1896–1950), after serving in the German Army during World War One, earned a Ph.D. and taught English, French, and Spanish. In 1928, he published Schlump anonymously, fearing acknowledgement would jeopardize his career. The book had respectable sales but was overshadowed by Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazis banned and burned Schlump.
Grimm rejected his wife’s plea to flee Germany. Instead, fearing imprisonment or worse, he joined the Nazi Party and was able to continue teaching. His students later confirmed his tolerance and recommending of banned books. During World War II, Grimm served as an interpreter in Nazi-occupied France. In post-war Germany, his Nazi party membership barred him from teaching, so he worked briefly in a theater, then in a sand mine. In 1950, two days after a meeting with East German Communist officials, he committed suicide.
Grimm’s failure to acknowledge authorship of Schlump (until after World War Two) and, even more, his participation in the Nazi regime, however removed from direct culpability, is a reminder that courage is a necessary, though often difficult, part of a virtuous life. Nevertheless, Schlump remains an important critique of a brutal war.
For a man who made the decision not to cooperate with the Nazis, see the excellent 2019 film “A Hidden Life.”
My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk (1998, 2001), trans. Erdag M. Göknar
Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (1998, 2001) centers around the murder of a court illustrator in the 16thcentury Ottoman Empire. More than an engaging mystery in an exotic setting, it is a novel of ideas about memory, perception, and especially art—East and West—its meaning, methods, purpose, cultural differences and borrowings, tradition and innovation. There are more than a dozen narrators, including the murder victim, the murderer, a dog, a tree, a gold coin, and the color red. Pamuk also has his characters address readers occasionally, sometimes admitting not everything they say is true. My Name Is Red is a clever, compelling tale of a climacteric time for art and cultural exchange.
The first chapter, “I Am a Corpse,” opens with the murder victim revealing he has been lying at the bottom of a well for four days. He is Master “Elegant,” one of four illustrators (“miniaturists”) commissioned by the Sultan to draw scenes for a secret book influenced by the methods of Renaissance Europe, particularly the Venetians. The Book of Festivities is “a commemorative story in verse” featuring the Sultan with his prized possessions. (p. 29) The task of illustrating the book is divided among four miniaturists: Butterfly, Elegant, Olive, and Stork, all nicknamed by the Sultan’s head illustrator, Master Osman. Each works in his own home, unaware of the others’ work, all of which were to be combined later.
Elegant does not know who killed him, but realizes it is because he had concluded that the illustrations were blasphemous, part of “an appalling conspiracy against our religion, our traditions and the way we see the world…” (p. 5) He was influenced by Nusret Hoja, whose fiery sermons blame military defeats and contagious diseases on a falling away from true Islam. The preacher calls for bans on Dervish lodges, coffee, musical instruments, and other worldly pleasures.
The murderer has been walking the streets since his crime, shocked that he could commit murder but justifying it as self-defense against Elegant revealing the secret book, which would have put the illustrators’ lives in danger. The killer argues that Allah would not have bestowed on the miniaturists the honor of illustrating the Sultan’s book if it were an unpardonable sin.
One of the main characters is 36-year-old “Black,” who returns to Istanbul after a twelve-year absence. He had been banished by his maternal uncle Enishte after falling in love with Enishte’s then 12-year-old daughter, Shekure. But the uncle has demanded Black’s return to write the story for the secret book, the creation of which Enishte is overseeing.
Shekure, now 24, is the mother of two boys, seven-year-old Shevket and six-year-old Orhan. Her soldier-husband is presumed missing in action after four years’ absence while fighting heroically against Persia. During that time, she was living with her father-in-law and brother-in-law Hasan, who wants to marry her. After Hasan tries to force his way into her bedroom, she and her boys move in with her father.
Esther is a Jewish clothes peddler who acts as liaison delivering letters between Shekure and the two men who love her, Black and Hasan. Esther reads the letters herself and sometimes allows Black and Hasan to read the other’s correspondence with Shekure. In her first message to Black, Skeure tells him not to visit. But Esther says a letter can indicate things not written. It is faintly scented and enclosed with a picture of lovers Shirin and Hüsrev [a.k.a., Khosrow], the first of several references to the tragic love story by Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (1140-1202).
Black understood Shekure’s tactic, as well: “I watched the tense quivering of my beloved’s angry letters, the somersaults they turned trying to deceive me and their hip-swinging right-to-left progression.” (p. 51) The two eventually begin meeting in secret, but Skekure will realize she also has romantic feelings for Hasan. Previously, she had hoped letters from suitors would make her more resolved to await her husband’s return, but now she wants a divorce to remarry. But to whom?
Meanwhile, the murderer feels jinns and demons raging within him. Despite his justification for the deed, a seed of doubt has grown. He wonders if Elegant was right about the illustrations being blasphemous. If true, then he had killed for no reason. He violently rejects the idea, but his legs “acting quicker and more rationally” than his mind set him in pursuit of another potential victim. (p. 123)
A major theme in My Name is Red concerns the nature of art. When Black first visits Butterfly, Stork, and Olive, each give him three parables about art: from Butterfly about style and signature, from Stork about time and perfection, from Olive about sight and memory.
A related question is whether the influence of Western art on Islamic art is religiously acceptable. An illustrated tree is glad he is not drawn in the European realist style. “I don’t want to be a tree. I want to be its meaning.” (p. 51) However, a horse says the European style is not sinful and he’s tired of being depicted the same way thousands of times.
Enishte, who had encountered Renaissance painting while a diplomat in Venice, describes to Black the variety, colors, light, and shadow of the European portraits: “They were distinctive, unique human faces!” (p. 107) The Western style both entices and frightens him, while Black thinks it could be used to serve Islam. Enishte later explains to an illustrator worried about the content of the secret book that art patrons—khans, sheikhs, and sultans—go through three phases: 1) commissioning art to gain respect and influence; 2) acquiring art for their own tastes; and 3) fearing the paintings are an obstacle to Heaven.
Enishte tells a parable of how innovation becomes tradition. A famed miniaturist, the Master of Isfahan, scoured manuscript libraries to destroy his illustrations he now deemed blasphemous. However, he discovered that two generations of artists had used his work as a model. Enishte observes, “A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds. Once a miniaturist’s artistry enters our souls this way, it becomes the criterion for the beauty of our world … the Master of Isfahan … understood that everybody now saw the world the way he had seen it.” (p. 161)
As the story continues, pressure mounts when the Sultan gives Master Illustrator Osman and Black three days to identify the murderer of Master Elegant by any means necessary. From an illustration found on the corpse, they decide to hold an impromptu contest among the secret-book miniaturists to match the recovered drawing.
Concurrently, the competition for Shekure’s heart culminates in a marriage witnessed by a corpse, while community tensions stirred by Nusret Hoja erupt into a violent conflagration.
Twenty-six years later, Shekure discloses the fates of Black, Hasan, and the illustrators. She has recounted the events to her son Orhan and given him her letters and illustrations to write the tale. She cautions readers, though, “For the sake of a delightful and convincing story, there isn’t a lie Orhan wouldn’t deign to tell.” (p. 413)
Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) was raised in a wealthy, secular family in Istanbul and, after briefly studying architecture, earned a degree in journalism. His first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, was published in 1982 and he first gained international notice with The White Castle in 1985. His sterling reputation was sealed with The Black Book (1990), My Name Is Red (1998), and Snow (2002), a status reflected in winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.
As stated on the Nobel Prize website: “Pamuk’s novels are characterized by the search for identity in the borderland between Western and Eastern values, an attempt to understand differences and similarities and an ambivalent yearning for both modern and old traditions.” His most recent novel is Nights of Plague (2021), a tale of the Medieval bubonic plague set on a fictional island of the Ottoman Empire.
The Lost Domain: Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) by Alain-Fournier (Henry Alban Fournier), trans. Frank Davison (2013)
Combining elements of quest, romance, fairytale, mystery, and coming-of-age story, The Lost Domain (French title: Le Grand Meaulnes) is an exquisite novel about friendship, love, loyalty, duty, sacrifice, the power of memory, the fragility of happiness, and the thin line between nobility and foolishness.
Author Henry Alban Fournier (1886-1914), writing as Alain-Fournier, was a schoolteacher turned journalist. Tragically, he was killed while fighting on the Western Front during World War One, leaving Le Grand Meaulnes (pron. “moan”) as his only novel. It is translated in beautiful prose by Frank Davison for Oxford University’s handsome centenary edition. Davison chose to retitle it The Lost Domain to avoid confusion about the French title, which refers to the pivotal character, Augustin Meaulnes.
The narrator is François Seurel, who, when the events began, is the 15-year-old son of schoolteachers in a small French village. One Sunday, sometime in the 1890s, Madame Meaulnes, a widow whose younger son had died, enrolls her elder, 17-year-old son, Augustin, in the upper school and to board with the Seurels. As François reflects, Augustin “unsettled our adolescence and … even when gone … gave us no respite.” (p. 8)
The other schoolboys soon called Augustin “le grand Meaulnes” (p. 14), which, as the translator notes has several meanings—tall, big, great, etc.—and as the story progresses connotes “daring, noble, tragic, fabulous.” When Monsieur Seurel asks the boys for a volunteer to drive François to pick up his grandparents, they shout: le grand Meaulnes! M. Seurel chooses another student because of Augustin’s unfamiliarity with the route. However, le grand Meaulnes takes the initiative to arrive first but gets lost, returning four days later, cold, exhausted, but strangely exultant.
That night, Augustin reveals to François what happened on his odyssey. While lost, he eventually found a mysterious domain being prepared for a wedding. After sleeping in an empty room, he was awakened by voices telling him to dress in period costume for the fête. He learns that the groom is Frantz de Galais, the son of the estate owner, and his fiancée, Valentine, is the daughter of a weaver. During the festivities, Augustin falls in love at first sight with Frantz’s sister, Yvonne.
The next morning, the wedding is called off because Valentine ran away, mistakenly thinking Frantz really loved her older sister. Augustin, before departing, introduces himself to Yvonne and speaks of his hopes for them. Upset by the wedding cancellation, she responds, “What’s the use?” (p.63) and requests that he not follow her, leaving Augustin disconcerted.
Augustin returns to the Seurels in a carriage that begins going very fast, passing Pierrot (a French pantomime character) distraught and running with a body in his arms, which is later revealed to have been Frantz, who had attempted suicide. Augustin then falls asleep. At this point, the reader may wonder whether Augustin dreamed this adventure.
Back at the school, Augustin studies maps to locate the mysterious domain and reunite with Yvonne. His secretiveness isolates him from the other boys, except for François. When an acting troupe arrives in town, a young man with a bandaged head joins the school and supplants Augustin as the alpha male by enthralling the other boys with curiosities and stories of his travels.
Tensions between Augustin and the vagabond actor culminate in a fight, after which the two bond as friends. The actor then tells Augustin about the de Galais’ Paris home, where Yvonne sometimes resides. At the end of the troupe’s performance, the actor appears without his bandage, revealing himself to be Frantz. Before Augustin can speak with him, the troupe flees in the night to avoid the police who believe them responsible for poultry thefts.
In the second half of the book, Augustin moves to Paris to find Yvonne but, instead, encounters Valentine. At first, he does not realize who she is, which leads to further complications. Meanwhile, François learns important clues from his aunt and uncle about Yvonne and the domain. He sets out to find her for Augustin, keeping the information secret so as not to raise potentially false hopes.
Readers, taken deeper into the twists of the plot, will be uncertain whether the fates of the couples—Augustin and Yvonne, Frantz and Valentine—will be happy, tragic, or mixed. With interest understandably focused on those characters, the outcome for François—revealed in the final sentences—will be profound, as well.
The Lost Domain: Le Grand Meaulnes is a marvelous journey for the reader and would make an excellent discussion topic for a book club or classroom.
The Eternal Husband (1870) by Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. by Hugh Alpin (2022)
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is one of the most revered writers in Western literature. His most notable works include the novella Notes from the Underground (1864) and the novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872, a.k.a., Devils or The Possessed), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
Dostoevsky’s books are often considered “novels of ideas” for their profound treatment of psychology and philosophy. They raise important questions about meaning, purpose, ideology, morality, religion, passion, and other fundamental aspects of human life.
Before venturing into his weightier works, my introduction to Dostoevsky began with a mid-career novella, The Eternal Husband (1870), called “a small masterpiece” by biographer Joseph Frank but not well known even by Russianists. (p. v) It is an excellent entrée to Dostoevsky for those who are trepidatious to tackle one of his 500-plus page books.
The Eternal Husband centers on the conflicted relationship between two men—Alexei Ivanovich Velchaninov and Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky—who encounter each other nine years after Alexei’s affair with Pavel’s wife ended. The title is a derogatory term for a husband who is an appendage of his unfaithful wife, and Trusotsky’s name is related to the Russian word (trus) for coward. (pp. v-vi).
However, as translator Hugh Alpin points out in the informative introduction, Dostoevsky rejected the traditional duality of the lover as dominant and predatory and the husband as submissive and craven. While elements of both stereotypes appear, Alexei tends toward hypochondria and occasional remorse, while Pavel seems sadistically to enjoy taking advantage of the moral high ground.
The story begins with Alexei seeing Pavel several times in St. Petersburg without remember him but feeling “objectless anger.” (p. 14) After dreaming of striking the man, he awakens to notice Pavel standing hesitantly outside the door of his apartment building. Alexei opens the door, recognizes Pavel, and invites him in. Pavel explains that his wife, Natalya, died of consumption. He has since been aimless and is now seeking the company of a friend. He reminisces about the days when Alexei was a frequent guest at their home and reveals that after Alexei left, “the most elegant young man”, Stepan Mikhailovich Bagautov became the new friend. “He, too, he too.” (p. 33) When Pavel leaves, Alexei slams the door and “spat as though sullied by something.” (p. 35)
Alexei had tried to forget the affair, after which he’d been ashamed of his disgraceful passion, but now “it all rises again.” (p. 37) Natalya had been an “all of nothing” person who was both magnanimous and very unfair. She never felt remorse for her many affairs, yet never mocked her husband nor allowed her lovers to do so. She was the “Virgin Mary of the Flagellants.” (p. 39)
The unraveling of the past is complicated when it’s revealed that Pavel is traveling with a girl, Liza, who may be Alexei’s daughter. Pavel introduces her to Alexei as “Our daughter.” (p. 47) Because of Pavel’s erratic, often drunken behavior, Alexei sends her to the dacha of friends who have several children. When Liza becomes ill, Alexei holds a vigil at her bedside and renounces his past regrets about Pavel, who stays away. When Alexei confronts him, Pavel calls Alexei his “truest friend.” (p. 83) But are Pavel’s intentions toward Alexei malicious? Was the recent death of Natalya’s ex-lover, Stepan, natural?
An important subplot involves Pavel’s betrothal to the teenage daughter of a government official, Nadya, who is in love with a handsome, self-important young man, Alexander Lobov. Pavel convinces a reluctant Alexei to accompany him to the family estate, but it is Alexei who charms the family and Pavel who is made the fool in the young peoples’ games. Pavel angrily demands they leave and gets Alexei to promise not to return. Relieved, Pavel says he considered Alexei noble, but Alexei responds that Pavel hates him and is lying to himself.
Their tangled relationship, with shifting emotions on both sides, will culminate in a violent encounter, followed by a penultimate chapter titled “Analysis” and the final chapter set on a train two years later which temporarily entwines their lives again.
At the end of the Alma Classics edition (2022) is a summary of Dostoevsky’s life and writings by translator Ignat Avsey. (pp. 185-208)
Paying Guests (1929) by E. F. Benson
E. F. Benson (1867-1940) was a prolific writer of almost 100 published works, including novels, short stories, ghost stories, biography, memoirs, history, sports, and opinion. He is best known for his six-novel Mapp and Lucia series, a satire of the rivalry between two women in interwar Britain, which has been adapted several times to radio and television since the 1980s.
Benson’s Paying Guests (1929) is a wryly humorous novel about the diverse denizens of The Wentworth, a hotel near Bolton Spa, known for its healing waters. The Wentworth is run by Mrs. Oxney with assistance from her sister, Amy Bertram, both widows. To boost business, Mrs. Oxney proposes a full-page ad to distinguish their hotel from others in the area. Mrs. Bertram, who “had a remarkable capacity for seeing the dark side of every situation (p. 3) … really liked the idea but instinct led her to object.” (p. 5)
Guest Alice Howard paints, dances, plays the piano, and is active in sports, all to the amazement of Mrs. Oxney and other guests, who see her as a “sort of incarnation of all the Muses.” (p. 11) Miss Howard tends to drop hints that lead to misimpressions in her favor, such that her humble duplex is soon assumed to be a grand ancestral estate, “The Croft.” She is known for her piano improvisations, which are either mistakes or musical passages practiced in secret.
The central character is the endearingly irascible Colonel Chase, an annual 10-month guest and Wentworth’s “undisputed cock of the walk” adored by Mrs. Oxney. (p. 20) The Colonel likes to brag about his bike riding, a sacrosanct subject to him, and considers himself the “final authority” during bridge games.
Fellow-guest Mrs. Holders likes to twist the lion’s tail. When bridge partner to the Colonel, she ignores his “hectoring instruction … [with] little acid smiles and elevations of her eyebrows … [leaving him feeling] like an autocrat in the presence of some ominously silent mob.” Mrs. Oxney’s encouragement to the Colonel “was only like the assurances of the old régime, that all was well with the Czardom.” When Mrs. Holders outbids him, her “cold devilish purpose … was like the edge of an assassin’s knife.” (p. 30)
Mrs. Holders’ rebellion thrills Florence Kemp, a longsuffering daughter of a father who exaggerates his pain, acts the invalid, and demands her daily sacrifice “on the altar of his aches.” (p. 36) She wonders what would happen if she challenged her father. Florence also idolizes the independent Miss Howard for whom she develops romantic feelings.
Perhaps the funniest character is the aptly named Mrs. Bliss. Rheumatoid arthritis requires her to use a cane, but she insists she’s only at the spa at her husband’s request. The constantly smiling Mrs. Bliss reflects the 1920s craze for Emile Coué’s philosophy of self-improvement through positive autosuggestion. She believes that sin, illness, and painful death are all Error which can be corrected by concentrating on Omnipotent Mind. Nothing exists “except love, health, harmony, and happiness.” When she rises from her chair, she stops smiling momentarily “as a pang of imaginary pain shot through her knee.” (p. 22)
Humorous episodes include Mrs. Bliss slyly accepting credit through Omnipotent Mind for the return of the Colonel’s missing pedometer and cure of his cold as well as her attempts to explain away her and others’ pain and distress. When gale winds cause the hotel to become cold and the fireplace to smoke, with her eyes stinging, tears streaming, and teeth chattering, she denies discomfort for “all was harmony in Omnipotent Mind.” (p. 42)
Meanwhile, the Colonel, who riveted fellow guests with stories of his dramatic encounters in India with a tiger and a ghost, receives unexpected audience reactions when delivering the tales at a community fête and later at a children’s hospital. His ego takes a further hit when his pursuit of Miss Howard as a potential wife is undermined by the machinations of his rival, Miss Kemp. The colonel’s attempt to hide the loss of his false teeth is sure to induce chuckles from readers.
Another narrative thread is Miss Howard’s solo art show and whether sales of the mediocre paintings can be credited to her behind-the-scenes self-promotion, the intervention of Mrs. Holders and herd instinct, or Omnipotent Mind.
The story continues through the end of the spa season and concludes with an epilogue about the new domestic arrangements of major characters.
Tristana by Benito Pérez Galdós (1892), translated by Margaret Jull Costa (2014)
Known for his psychologically complex characters, Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is one of Spain’s most acclaimed novelists, often considered second only to Miguel de Cervantes. Born on the Canary Islands, Galdós attended law school in Madrid, but left legal studies to become a journalist.
Publication of his first novel, The Golden Fountain Café, in 1870 began a prolific 50-year literary career, resulting in almost 80 novels and 22 plays. Fortuna and Jacinta (1886) is considered his masterpiece, while other key works include Doña Perfecta (1876), Miau (1888), Misericordia (1897), and the novel reviewed here, Tristana (1892), filmed in 1970 by Luis Buñuel. The translation under review (2014) is by the peerless Margaret Jill Costa and part of the excellent New York Review of Books’ Classics series.
Tristana (1892) is a fascinating portrait of a young woman seeking independence from constraints placed on her by 19th-century Spanish society and by her older, legal guardian turned lover, Don Lope de Sosa. Both characters are multifaceted with virtues and flaws, and clever in this shrewd battle of wits.
Claiming to be 49 year old, Don Lope is 57 with a “proud, soldierly bearing” (p. 3) and a “skilled strategist in the war of love.” (p. 4) A man of generally good conscience, “his moral sense functioned only partially … Don Lope accepted neither guilt nor responsibility” regarding women. (p. 17) He said that adultery was a sin in the Ten Commandments only because Moses added it for “political reasons…” It was now outdated; “life moves on.” (p. 18)
Don Lope’s inherited, moderate wealth has dwindled mainly through his generosity to friends, but he insists on keeping up appearances.
His knightliness verged on vanity, and vanity always has a price—just as the luxury of good intentions is always the most expensive—and Don Lope’s fortunes suffered as a result. His family motto, ‘Give your shirt to your friend,’ was not a mere rhetorical affectation. (p. 11)
Don Lope sold property and art so his friend Don Antonio Reluz, Tristana’s father, could be released from debtor’s prison. When Reluz died shortly after, Lope courted his widow, paid the family’s expenses, and, after her death, became guardian to the teenage Tristana, whom he ruled with “tender authority.” (p. 8)
Tristana had been resigned to her fate, but upon reaching the age of 21 awakened with shock to her situation and desired independence. Many of her ideas and manners, however, she had learned from Don Lope, including “the art of dissembling … the kind of skillful deviations … that are almost always dangerous.” (p. 21) Both believe that marriage is the devil’s work.
When pricked by jealousy, Don Lope would interrogate and threaten Tristana, who “felt vaguely frightened, but not terrified,” never quite believing his bluster. (p. 31) She ignores his ban on accompanying the older maid, Saturna, on her errands. On one outing, Tristana sees and instantly falls in love with Horacio Diaz, a young artist. With Saturna’s help, they begin surreptitiously seeing each other, which Tristana vehemently denies when confronted by the suspicious Don Lope.
Like Tristana, Horacio had suffered an isolated youth, raised by his stern grandfather who considered art frivolous and blasphemous. Horacio, however, broke free to study art, convinced it was his destiny. His story inspires Tristana, who is trying to escape Don Lope’s hold and find purpose in her life. Don Lope’s realization that she no longer fears him convinces him of the affair. “The female heart holds no secrets for me.” (p. 117) His strategy is to act as the noble father in a Golden Age play.
Horatio teaches painting and Italian to Tristana, who proves adept at everything she attempts—painting, language, literature, theatre, and music. He had assumed she would subordinate her intellect and will to his, but Tristana has her own ideas, and her imagination sparks his. Horatio wants to marry her but Tristana, while affirming her love, refuses. Her motto is “Freedom with honor…” (p. 77) He admires her determination, but thinks she will eventually change her mind.
On the surface, the plot presents a proverbial love triangle. But with Galdos, it is never so simple. Not only are the three main characters complex, but their attitudes and aspirations, even their memories, change over time. Their fates are not set. The storyline does not move inexorably toward either a tragic or happy ending. Galdos often confounds reader expectations. For example, while the first meeting between Don Lope and Horacio is understandably strained, both men leave it admiring, even liking, the other.
Is Tristana a critique of traditional gender relations, particularly of 19th-century Spain, a critique—or satire—of romantic love, or both? Do the ultimate decisions made by the protagonists implicate the vanity of worldly ways and ambitions? Galdos’ narrative militates against certainty, and the novel’s last lines brings an apt ambiguity to what had seemed the resolution.
Tristana would be a masterpiece for most writers, but there is apparently even better works ahead, so let us read on.
​