Books Reviews
~ Cont. ~
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), by Brian Moore
Set in Belfast, Ireland, in the 1950s, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is the story of a plain, middle-aged woman who longs for marriage, indeed, for love at all. We meet her when she is unpacking her few belongings in the boarding house of Mrs. Henry Rice. Miss Hearne’s two prized possessions are a silver-framed photograph of her stern aunt, who had raised her and whom she had nursed for years after a stroke, and a Sacred Heart of Jesus, “His eyes kindly yet accusing…” (p. 7) We learn later that she has moved several times in only a few years, and the secret reason why.
Author Brian Moore has wonderful, almost Dickensian descriptions of the characters. “Mrs. Henry Rice, informative, drooped her huge bosom over the table like a bag of washing.” (pp. 25-26) Her son, Bernie, is fat and horrid looking, “like some monstrous baby swelled to man size.” When they first meet, Bernie stares at Judy, “rejecting her as all males had before him.” (pp. 9-10) Seeing himself as a genius, he dropped out of Queen’s University to write great poetry.
Boarders include Miss Friel, a brusque schoolteacher who wears a Total Abstinence pin, and Mr. Lenahan, a clerk, his “thin mouth curving into a sickled smile.” (p. 23) It is Mrs. Henry Rice’s brother, James Madden, large, handsome, manly, and recently returned from America, who captivates Miss Hearne’s heart.
After dinner, Judy Hearne sits in her room “waiting like a prisoner for the long night hours.” (p. 34) While weekdays ticked slowly, “Sunday was the great day of the week” because of Mass, in which “everyone was doing the same thing,” and “the big event,” her afternoon visits to the O’Neills, which had “the pleasures of home.” (p. 70) The mother, Moira, was a friend from youth, and Judy considered herself “a sort of unofficial aunt” to the O’Neill children. (p. 53)
During the week, she prepares for the visit by collecting interesting stories to recount, finding them “where other people would find only dullness. [It was] … a gift which was one of the great rewards of a solitary life.” It was necessary for a single woman. Married women had other things to discuss, but no one wanted to know how a single woman managed. (p. 12)
For the O’Neills, however, visits by “the Great Bore” were something to be endured. The father, Owen, a professor, flees to his study, and the children go various ways as soon as their mother allows, making fun of Miss Hearne’s expressions repeated weekly. Even Moira falls asleep while Judy is talking.
At the boarding house, Madden boasts about his life in New York City, where he says he was in the hotel business. Judy is the only one who shows interest, reading about New York at the library to ask better questions. Thus begins a relationship built on misunderstanding. Madden assumes she has wealth and will become his business partner, while she thinks he is a prosperous businessman who will eventually marry her.
In fact, Madden is an unemployed doorman who received an insurance settlement after being hit by a bus. As he walks Belfast the “heavy depression of idleness set in” as “[t]he rain wept itself into a lashing rage…” (pp. 41 & 43) When he returns to find Bernie in bed with the young maid, Mary: “Righteous indignation filled him, flooding his brain with the near-ecstasy of power. The day’s futile drinking, the loneliness, the frustrations, all swam away and left this glorious rage in their stead.” Madden soon finds himself obsessed with Mary, attacking her “like a dog at meat.” (p. 104)
Bernie wants his uncle to move out of the boarding house so he can have peace again to write poetry and keep his relationship with Mary secret. Inspired by Machiavelli, Bernie reinforces Miss Hearne’s misperception, telling her his uncle is playing hard to get. Realizing she is an alcoholic Bernie uses her weakness to further his aims.
Judy is not particularly religious, though she never missed Sunday mass or daily prayers and is devoted to the Sacred Heart. “Religion was there: it was not something you thought about…” (p. 59) Events will test her faith, leading her to plead to God for a sign. At confession, the priest is rude and indifferent. Another priest will spout platitudes but later realize he failed her.
With pathos and wit, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne reveals the vulnerability of single women with limited options, the deception of others and self, and the prejudices, cruelty and, ultimately, compassion of human nature.
Raised in Belfast, author Brian Moore (1921-1999) served as a civilian for the British Army during World War II. Moving to Canada in 1948, he worked as a journalist and wrote pulp fiction anonymously, before moving to New York City a decade later. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) was his first serious novel published under his name, followed by 22 others, including The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), Black Robe (1985), and three short-listed for the Booker Prize: The Color of Blood (1987), Lies of Silence (1990), and The Magician’s Wife (1997). He wrote the screenplay for The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1964) and co-wrote Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966). In 1967, he moved California, teaching creative writing at UCLA for 15 years.
The Land of Green Plums (1993) by Herta Müller, trans. Michael Hofmann (1998)
Author Herta Müller (b. 1953) is a Romanian of German descent who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. Her novel The Land of Green Plums (1993) follows the vulnerable lives of a group of young Romanians to reveal the menace and mistrust manifested under the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu (r. 1965-1989): “...in this country, we had to walk, eat, sleep, and love in fear...” (p. 2)
The opening scenes effectively convey the amorality, privileges of authority, and deadly hazard of deviance from the oppressive conformity of the regime. Lola, a college student from a poor district, has sex with anonymous men she meets on the tram as well as with the college gym teacher, who reports her after she follows him home. Lola is soon found dead in her dorm room, hanging by a belt of a roommate, the unnamed narrator.
Lola’s photo is swiftly posted at the dormitory entrance with a statement condemning her crime (suicide), which “brought disgrace upon the whole country.” (p. 23) At a formal ceremony, Lola is called a deceiver and “ex-matriculated from the university” as hundreds applaud. A vote is taken by a show of hands to expel her from the Communist Party. The gym teacher raises his hand first, followed by the rest. They kept their hands raised until they were tired, fearing to lower them until the gym teacher said the vote was unanimous. (p. 28)
The narrator and her friends Edgar, Kurt, and Georg doubt Lola’s death was suicide. The narrator had found Lola’s notebook and gives it to the young men who hide notebooks and other restricted books in a summer house. Edgar and Georg’s poems and Kurt’s photos of prison bases were also hidden there. In doing so, “[t]hey had exchanged fear for insanity.” (p. 41)
Many Romanians wanted to go to East Germany, where blue jeans and other products were more readily available. “Everyone lived by thinking of flight.” (p. 47) Edgar says the secret police spread rumors of the leader’s illness to catch those fleeing or planning to. At first, the four young people don’t want to leave Romania. But when they undergo interrogation, being followed, and searches of their and their parents’ residences, they begin planning to escape separately.
The group meets daily, laughing to hide their fear. “But fear always finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you manage to keep a grip on your face and your voice ... it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie there. You can see it lying around on objects close by.” (pp. 74-75) Soon separated by different jobs, they cautiously communicate through coded letters and phone calls.
While working at a factory, the narrator develops a friendship with Tereza, whose refusal to join the Communist Party is allowed for a while because her father is a factory official. Worried the summer house will be searched, the narrator puts its secret cache in Tereza’s office. “Tereza took the parcel on trust, and I didn’t trust her.” (p. 114) Their friendship’s fragile foundation is indicative of the uncertainty of relationships engendered by the repressive regime. As the narrator realizes, “My distrust caused everything close to me to slide away.” (p. 131)
A sub-theme of the novel is the narrator’s troubled relationship with her family, which includes a senile grandmother who wanders into the fields at night. Rich in symbolism and excellently translated by Michael Hofmann, The Land of Green Plums is a powerful indictment of the criminality of Ceauşescu’s reign.
During World War Two, Herta Müller’s father had served in the Nazi army and later her mother, along with other Romanian Germans, spent five years of forced labor in the Soviet Union. Those examples instilled in young Herta Müller a recognition of the corrupting influence of ideology on individuals. While working as a translator at a factory, she befriended other writers opposed to the Ceauşescu dictatorship.
Müller lost her job in 1979 when she refused to spy for the secret police on workers and foreign visitors. The censored version of her first book, Nadirs, was published in 1982 in Romania and an uncensored version in Germany in 1984, which gained her recognition as a talented writer. Her criticism in the German press of the communist regime in Romania resulted in a publishing ban, interrogations, slanderous rumors, and death threats. She and her husband, writer Richard Wagner, emigrated to Germany in 1987. Her other works include Traveling on One Leg, The Appointment, The Hunger Angel, and The Passport. For more information, see her Nobel Prize biography.
Finger Bone (2014) by Hiroki Takahashi, trans. Takami Nieda (2023)
Set during World War Two, Finger Bone, is a fascinating novella about a Japanese soldier injured and sent to a field hospital in the mountains of Papua New Guinea. The title refers to the practice of medics cutting off a finger of the deceased, burning the flesh, and returning the bone to the soldier’s family in Japan. The unnamed narrator carries a finger bone of his schoolmate killed by “friendly fire” moments before his own injury. “His death nearly broke me.” (p. 44)
At the hospital, the narrator befriends Sanada, a 21-year-old private whose face is bandaged and Shimizu, an artist who lost his dominant left hand from grenade shrapnel but learned to draw with his right hand. His beautiful landscapes and camp scenes will decorate the hospital walls. The narrator and Sanada find a Kanaka village, where Sanaka agrees to teach the natives Japanese in return for shells to buy mangoes. He speculates that the Kanakas will use the Japanese language as tour guides after the war when Japan controls the island.
That assumption reflects the confidence held by the Japanese soldiers, reinforced by unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation. Ichimura, who oversees the POWs, is confident Japan will win because Americans are afraid of suicide. He compares a typical American soldier to “[a] tourist on a camping trip with his buddies.” (p. 38) The narrator and his fellow soldiers hear rumors of Japan’s conquest of Guadalcanal, the Imperial Navy’s “stunning victory” at Midway, air raids “over Oregon, and that the rest of the US mainland was being razed … by firebombs…” (p. 72)
Meanwhile, there are daily deaths of patients, many of them from malaria because the hospital ran out of medicine for it. “The empty beds grew conspicuous ... the sick and wounded had stopped arriving.” (p. 21) The narrator often woke in the middle of the night. “My nerves were always on alert ...” Once awake, if he couldn’t fall asleep again, he would sit on a tree stump and look at the stars, which “were exceptionally beautiful after the rain.” (p. 61)
One morning, emaciated Japanese soldiers arrive at the hospital with news that the Allies controlled the entire eastern coast. The hospital is evacuated of those able to walk and grenades for potential suicide are issued to all. The long march from the hospital is described in stark and powerful terms of the desperation, disorientation, despair, and death. “This too is war.” (p. 115)
The conclusion is foreshadowed at the beginning of the narrative:
I gazed at the husks of men shambling past. Hunched forward as if weighed down by a heavy burden, they dragged one foot, then the other, slowly across the yellow dirt, towing long shadows behind them. One shadow receded toward a pair of ankles, its owner listing forward. A thud. The human stirred no more. As the sun traced an arc across the sky, his shadow ticked around him like a sundial. (p. 7)
Finger Bone earned author Hiroki Takahashi the Shincho Prize for New Writers in 2014. The book is excellently translated into English (2023) by Takami Nieda, an award-winning translator and professor at Seattle Central College. In 2018, Hiroki Takahashi won the Akutagawa Prize for his novel Ceremonial Fire. I look forward to his other work being translated into English.
Closely Observed Trains (1965) by Bohumil Hrabal, trans. Edith Pargeter (1968)
The novella Closely Observed Trains (1965) by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal is set mainly in a Bohemian railway station as World War Two is ending in Europe in the spring of 1945. The station is small but important as a transport nexus for German troops and war matériel to and from the shifting Eastern front. Although ultimately a story of sacrificial heroism, humor softens the tragic trajectory.
The main character is Milǒs Hrma, a naïve 22-year- old railroad traffic controller, whose job it is to raise and lower the signals for trains. His family has a reputation for laziness based on the great-grandfather, a drummer boy wounded in 1848, who thereafter lived off a war pension. His gloating about it often provoked beatings, one of which caused his death in 1935.
Milǒs’s grandfather had been a circus hypnotist, which townspeople saw as “an ambitious bid to stroll his way through life as idly as possible.” (p. 11) When German troops passed through the town in 1939, the grandfather was the only one to confront them. But his attempt to hypnotize them was thwarted by a tank rolling over him. Milǒs’s father was a retired locomotive driver who collected rubbish and odd parts from dumps, resulting in their place looking like a scrapyard.
In flashbacks, we learn that Milǒs fell in love with a young woman, Masha, while they were painting opposite sides of a fence. Later, his anxiety prevents him from fulfilling the act of lovemaking and his subsequent humiliation leads him to slash his wrists. The unsuccessful suicide attempt is seen by townspeople as an attempt to avoid work.
Among the book’s cast of colorful characters is stationmaster Lánský, a pigeon-breeder whose opulent office “left you with the feeling that it ought to be carried around on a palanquin, complete with the station-master in it ...” (p. 20)
Seeing his current situation as “casting my pearls before swine” he anticipates promotion to inspector. (p. 24)
The funniest part of the book is the scandal of lecherous dispatcher Hubička who imprinted telegrapher Virginia Svatá’s derriere with station stamps and photographed the result. The stationmaster, a member of the Society for Public Regeneration, is horrified and an official investigation ensues after Virginia’s mother reports the incident. When the traffic chief Slušný arrives, Lánský hurries back to his office, covered with pigeon droppings and “above whose face a feather … fluttered like a white question mark.” (p. 52)
Yet, for all the humor, the suffering caused by the war manifests through several vignettes: a neighbor who has lost her mind after four years of German imprisonment; dying animals transported from the front to the slaughterhouse; a medical train of wounded soldiers in agony; evacuees from Dresden arriving in their pajamas.
The story culminates in an attempt to blow up an ammunition train between stations, thus avoiding collateral damage. Devised by Hubička in collaboration with a German resistance agent, Victoria Freie, it is to be carried out by Milǒs. Before Milǒs leaves on the mission, Victoria awakens his manhood in another comic scene penultimate to the dramatic ending.
Author Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) was born in Brno, Moravia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later living in Prague. During World War II, he worked as a railroad dispatcher. He received a law degree in 1946 but never practiced law; instead, working in a serious of jobs, including stagehand, notary clerk, postal worker, insurance agent, and traveling salesman.
In 1962, Hrabal became a full-time writer, but Communist censorship meant that he often published underground or abroad. Closely Watched Trains [an alternative English title for this novella] was filmed by Czech New Wave director Jiří Menzel. It won the 1967 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and gained Hrabal international attention. Other major works include Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (1964), I Served the King of England (1973), and Too Loud a Solitude (1977).
His Only Son by Leopoldo Alas (1890), trans. Margaret Jull Costa (2016)
Leopoldo Alas (1852-1901) was late-19th-century Spain’s leading literary critic as well as a novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and professor of law and political economy at the University of Oviedo. His thousands of published articles promoted literary naturalism, liberalism, and anticlericalism.
Alas’s most esteemed novels are La Regenta (1884-1885), often considered the Spanish Madame Bovary, and His Only Son (1890). In 2016, the New York Review of Books Classics published His Only Son along with the novella Doña Berta (1892) translated and with an introduction by the incomparable Margaret Jull Costa.
At the center of the story in His Only Son is the marriage of Emma Valcárcel, a spoiled, domineering, hypochondriacal heiress, and Bonifacio Reyes, a déclassé, romantic dreamer. A gentle, sentimental man, Bonifacio loves to play his flute. “The cloying, monotonous, meek, almost nasal timbre of that melancholy instrument … was completely in harmony with his character …” (p. 6)
Emma is not interested in his music and sees her handsome husband simply as “an ornament, entirely hollow and empty inside,” but good for provoking envy among the town’s ladies. (p. 8) She spends lavishly on clothes for Bonifacio and herself and supports numerous cadging cousins. The family finances are overseen by Emma’s uncle, Don Juan Nepomuceno, who terrifies Bonifacio and assumes wide discretionary control.
Often in bed with imaginary illnesses, Emma gives Bonifacio credit for his nimble massages. However, her foul temper is easily sparked, as in a hilarious scene when she complains of liver pain. Bonifacio points out her liver is on the other side of her body, but her sycophantic cousin Sebastián defends her, calling it “referred pain.” (p. 20)
The routine of the marriage and village life are disrupted with the arrival of an opera troupe, led by singer-impresario Mochi and his stars, the beautiful soprano, Serafina La Gorheggi (an Englishwoman posing as Italian), and the dashing baritone, Minghetti (a Spaniard posing as Italian). Bonifacio begins attending the daily rehearsals, where “one saw the artists as they really were …” He admired them for the “courage to trust [their] … living to a …” musical instrument of voice. (p. 30)
Bonifacio falls in love with Serafina and begins borrowing money from Don Juan and others to support her and Mochi’s opera. As the love affair blossoms and his debts mount, Bonifacio works hard to keep his fears and remorse at bay.
Meanwhile, Emma demands more time from Bonifacio as her supposed illnesses increase. His submissive saintliness makes her suspicious, but his smell of Serafina’s rice powder awakens Emma’s amorous desire for her husband. A rejuvenated Emma soon attends the opera, where she notices the handsome Minghetti, who becomes her piano teacher and, perhaps, lover.
The romantic relationships are further complicated when Emma learns she is pregnant. She is horrified, having had previous miscarriages and being frightened of a painful death: “the approaching catastrophe…” (p. 204)
Bonifacio is joyful. He did not believe in miracles, but he did in Providence. “He and Providence understood each other.” (p. 195) Filled with hope that he will finally have a son, Bonifacio quickly adopts a sober attitude of paternal responsibility.
For others, the impending birth raises the question of who the father is and Bonifacio’s belated attempt at fiscal management spawns concern and conflict.
His Only Son is a humorous, yet touching, story of colorful characters caught in the web of their fateful choices.