translation

The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

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For quite a few years, I’ve spotted too late that German Literature Month was happening in November – run by Lizzy’s Literary Life. And this year I also spotted it pretty late in the day, but I didn’t have any emergency reading to finish for book group etc., so decided to see what I had on my shelves. Even better if it qualified for Project Names. So I was very pleased to dig out The Quest for Christa T by Christa Wolf, originally published in 1968 and translated into English shortly afterwards by Christopher Middleton.

It’s a short novel in which the main character is Christa T, but her life is told entirely in retrospect. Her friend is the narrator, although we don’t learn much about her – instead, she gives us a fractured portrait of Christa as she knew her [pronouns are going to be tricky in this post!].

We know from the outset that Christa died young, and we keep waiting for further hints that might explain how. And since we start in Hitler’s Germany, there is the constant threat of Nazis being the answer to that question. Especially since Christa is alarmed by the rampant nationalism she sees around her – the placards and the shouting.

But this is not what kills her. We move on into post-war Germany, as Christa meets various suitors, and tries her hand at teaching. Hers is an ordinary life in extraordinary times. An ordinary and not very ambitious life, that becomes exceptional because of Wolf’s way of writing this strange novella. It resists every norm of writing the usual Bildungsroman – it is, as the title suggests, a quest. Christa might be dead, and she cannot be physically sought, but the narrator is on a quest to compile an understanding of her – for letters, papers, and memories.

She wasn’t aware of the effect she had, I know. I’ve seen her later, walking through other towns, with the same stride, the same amazed look in her eyes. It always seemed that she’d taken it upon herself to be at home everywhere and a stranger everywhere, at home and a stranger in the same instant; and as if from time to time it dawned on her what she was paying for and with.

The writing is so unusual. Fragments of recollections are spread on the page, interspersed with guesswork and extrapolations. She is piecing together a life from what she knows and what she imagines – and the reader is always chasing a little to keep up. It’s like an impressionist painting, but where nothing quite coheres. The Quest for Christa T reminded me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, but where that exercise in piecing together a life flows in beautiful, poetic sentences, like the coming in and going out of tides, there is no similar beauty in Wolf’s writing. It is beautiful, but in a different way – a stark, disjointed, abstract way. Each sentence is set at slightly the wrong angle to the next one. So, even when the words are profound or lovely, they don’t quite settle before we see Christa from a different vantage. We are putting together an impression of a life at one remove, with jigsaw pieces that don’t quite align.

As such, it isn’t an easy or quick read. I found I really had to concentrate as I read it. But it definitely rewards the effort. It’s not the sort of novella that I think I’ll remember in terms of the details – but I’ll certainly remember an impression of Wolf’s novel, and what it felt like to read it.

 

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov

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I was staying in Edinburgh when I came across the Pushkin Press edition of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov, published in 1948 in Russian and translated by Bryan Karetnyk. I’m always drawn to these lovely little editions, but what got this book from the shelf and into my bag – having, naturally, paid – was this blurb on the inside flap:

A man comes across a short story which recounts in minute detail his killing of a soldier, long ago – from the victim’s point of view. It’s a story that should not exist, and whose author can only be a dead man.

Intriguing, no? And then we have this opening line…

Of all my memories, of all my life’s innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed.

I’ve kind of given the game away on that line – because, yes, the murder was committed during the Russian Civil War. The unnamed narrator was shot at and his horse killed, and fired in return at his assailant – leaning over him to make the final shot. And then, hearing more people from the opposing side in the distance, took the dead man’s horse and fled. He was only sixteen, and the event has haunted him since.

Many years later, he picks up a collection of three short stories – two of which are well written tales of love and mischance, but the third unmistakably relates the events that happened to him. He decides he must track down the author, Alexander Wolf, and discover how this Englishman knows anything about what happened.

I shan’t give away any plot details, but it is a brilliant premise that is handled well – largely because Gazdanov is so good at maintaining the emotional and character-led responses to the ultimate explanation, rather than because it is necessarily the most believable in terms of plot. The psychological intensity and reality of the novel is unwavering, and the narrator is such a well realised character, with the same shifting and nuanced morality that actual people have.

The only complaint I have about the structure is that it dives away from the central mystery into a seemingly irrelevant plot about boxing and a budding romance that the narrator explores. I don’t really mind the inevitable coincidence that links it back to the main plot, but the sudden shift to introduce it – during which the narrator apparently forgets the drive he initially had to unearth Wolf – doesn’t quite make sense.

I’ve read very few Russian authors, being largely put off by the evident length of the books and the probable misery within them. This one is fewer than 200 pages (hurrah!) and emotionally complex. It’s a brilliant idea that is sustained and manipulated in a sophisticated way.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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It always feels slightly different to read a book that is a worldwide bestseller. I’d obviously heard of The Alchemist (1988) by Paulo Coelho, but I couldn’t tell you a lot about it. Except that I’ve always got it mixed up with Perfume by Patrick Suskind, which I also hadn’t read.

Well, my book group chose this book and I borrowed a copy from my brother Colin, who hadn’t been enthusiastic in his mini review of it. This edition is translated from the Portuguese by Alan Clarke – I don’t know if there are mutliple translations out there. I was certainly intrigued by the atmosphere of the opening paragraph:

The boy’s name was Santiago. Dusk was falling as the boy arrived with his herd at an abandoned church. … an enormous sycamore had grown on the spot where the sacristy had once stood.

In case there are others who didn’t know the plot – it’s about this boy called Santiago who lives in Andalusia, where he is a shepherd. But he dreams of more from life, and can’t stop thinking about a fortune he received from a fortune teller – that he should travel to Egypt to discover treasure.

Off he goes to Africa but not, he quickly learns, materially nearer Egypt than he was when he started. I can’t remember if it’s spelled out, but I’m pretty sure he’s in Morocco – where his money gets stolen by a conman, and he must work for a crystal merchant. He is still determined to raise the money to find this supposed treasure.

Rather late in the day, he does get to Egypt and meet the alchemist – who seems more minor a character than I’d have anticipated from the title. And then it all becomes a mixture of magic realism and an Aesopian fable.

So, what did I think? Well, I really enjoyed the first third of the novel. Santiago is a wonderful character – an interesting mix of determination, hope, uncertainty, and naivety. All of the stuff in Morocco was a delight, and I would happily have read a novel of his experience in the crystal shop – becoming something of a surrogate child to the crystal seller. I’ve never been to Morocco, but I felt rather like I had when I was reading this.

But as the novel moves forward, and Coelho loses any sense of being tethered to the ground, then I lost my affection for The Alchemist. And it’s not even my documented reluctance for magical realism. It’s because the novel tries to become extremely profound, and succeeds in sounding rather silly. There’s an awful lot about following your heart and the truth being in all of us etc. etc., and it began to feel a bit like a thought-a-day desk calendar. It’s everything I kind of suspect the most run-of-the-mill self help books might be. I felt like Coelho’s sensitive eye for character was rather wasted in a series of philosophical truisms.

He’s continued writing ever since, but I haven’t heard of any of the other books. I’d love to try something else by him if he’s written anything that is less queasy. And I can do no better than quoting a line from Col’s thoughts: “A life-changing book, the blurb claims, but I suspect mostly for people who believe horoscopes.”

 

 

Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen

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I read a second book for Women in Translation month, but didn’t get around to reviewing it. But here are some quick thoughts about Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen (2013), translated by David McDuff.

I read Boel Westin’s excellent biography of Tove Jansson when it was translated a few years ago. It was one of those times like buses, where you wait ages for a biography to come out and then two come at once. I’m not sure why I leaned towards the Westin – maybe it came out first? It was also the authorised biography, I believe, though I’m not sure I knew that at the time.

Karjalainen certainly didn’t go rogue with her lack-of-authorisation and spread all sorts of salacious rumours. Instead, she takes us on a journey through the work and love of the title. And it’s a steady, methodical journey.

I really enjoyed reading this book, but here is where we come across the main reason that I think Westin’s biography is better. Karjalainen compartmentalises Jansson’s life so thoroughly that it’s as though she were living four or five parallel lives, without overlap. She writes at length and sensitively about Jansson’s relationships with men and women, but at such length that for a while her career disappears completely. The Moomins are cautiously not addressed for half the book, except for an accidental stray mention that doesn’t make sense since she’s given no context. I can understand that this sort of makes sense, but it means jumping back and forth in time, and pretending that Jansson’s love life was completely unrelated to her career, or that her success as a strip cartoonist had little bearing on her painting. And so on and so forth. Then again, when I reviewed Westin’s book, I complained about repetition… maybe there’s no way to deal with the complexity and overlaps of Jansson’s life and career within the confines of a conventional biography.

I will add, in each of her compartmentalised areas Karjalainen writes interestingly – though leaning perhaps a little too much towards the ‘Jansson must have felt…’ school of biography. As with Westin’s, there isn’t as much about the adult books I love so much, but I suppose that’s inevitable. And thankfully, as with Westin’s book, there are lots of beautifully reproduced examples of the paintings being talked about – even if Karjalainen evidently didn’t know which would be there when she was writing it, as the composition of some paintings are described in unnecessary length when we can just looked at them on the page opposite.

Oh, and the book itself – beautiful! I love the design and the solidity of it. Surely one of the nicest-looking and -feeling books I have on my shelves.

Overall – yes, I’d forgotten enough about Jansson’s life since I read Westin’s biography that I enjoyed learning it all again. But for my money, if you only read one biography of Tove Jansson, this should be your second choice.

Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst

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Earlier in the year, I experimented with different book recommendation websites – you can read my exploits here. My favourite was Which Book, and I had great fun playing with the different sliders to determine what sort of book would match my mood. The results aren’t the usual fare, and they include a lot of translated fiction. I definitely recommend having a go.

I don’t remember which sliders I used to get the result of Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (2006) by Dimitri Verhulst, though I’m pretty sure ‘short’ was among them. This novella is only 145 pages and there’s with a big font. Definitely up my street! I think it might also be the first Dutch novel I’ve ever read – with thanks to the translator, David Comer. [A commenter has told me that it’s actually translated from Flemish – be more precise, publisher!]

Madame Verona lives in an isolated house on top of a hill, on the outskirts of a small village. ‘As far as anyone knew, it had always been inhabited by outsiders, people from elsewhere, who came here with a romantic view of isolation and paid for it later with large chunks of their mind.’ But there is no sense that Madame V has particularly suffered from her isolation, even though her husband has been dead for more than twenty years. She has the gift of dogs loving her, as the first chapter dwells upon. They have been a constant, and a dog is accompanying her as she comes down the hill.

In terms of plot in the ‘present day’ section of the novella, the title pretty much sums it up. Snow is thick on the ground, and Madame Verona has slowly made her way down the steep hill. And she knows that she won’t make it back to the top. She is too old and too tired. She has, in essence, come down the hill to die.

We flit to and from this present day, but the novella is really a mixture of memories and reflections – sometimes clearly Madame Verona’s thoughts, and sometimes a broader and more philosophical narrator’s voice. These aspects go together well. We see the specifics of the village and of Madame Verona’s marriage – and we hear more general considerations of time and community and particularly age. Here’s a rather lovely passage I noted down:

Silence is often more intense after its return. When a tree accepts its defeat, creaks and capsizes, all life flies up and off. There’s crowing and cawing, branches crack, it rains feathers and down, rabbits flee to their underground shelters. All things considered, the titan’s contact with the actual ground is quiet; people generally expect it to be louder. It’s mainly the rest of the forest that kicks up a fuss and makes a racket. And once the creatures have assessed the damage, silence comes back. Eyes and leaves turn to the light that has never shone so brightly here. A place has come free, the struggle can begin, because the space will be occupied, by something or someone. It’s like that for trees, it’s like that for people.

I might have appreciated a little more about Madame Verona in the present day, because it is a bit sparse there, but this is a very enjoyable little book. It has aspects of melancholy, but Verhulst’s thoughtful exploration of little facets of life mean it doesn’t feel bleak – helped by the beautiful descriptions of the landscape. There is a lovely tone to it that comes through the translation. That translation can be a little clunky (‘She wasn’t brave enough to go downstairs herself. And what if she did, and found herself eye to eye with a person of bad will, how would that lead to a better outcome?’) but that is the exception rather than the rule.

Thanks, Which Book, my first read based on your recommendations certainly went well!

Reeds in the Wind by Grazia Deledda

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Women in translation month! I usually intend to join in and then don’t manage it, but have managed a bit better this year – in that I’d finished one and I’m halfway through another. First up, Reeds in the Wind (1913), translated by Martha King from Italian – though I think perhaps Italian with Sardinian dialect thrown in there?

My friend Phoebe lent this to me a few years ago, and I’ve been meaning to pick it up ever since, so WIT month was a great excuse. I think she’s been to the area where it’s set, which I absolutely haven’t done. I wonder how much of rural Sardinia looks the same a century later? Deledda was quite a noted author, and certainly an extremely prolific one. Even a glance at her Wikipedia page is quite exhausting. But Reeds in the Wind is one of her most famous, apparently.

The protagonist is Efix – a man who has served the Pintor family for many years. He is a loyal servant, placing the dignity and happiness of the family above his own – and, indeed, above almost anything. And the family is no longer the dominant force in the area that they once were. Three unmarried sisters make up the current crop – Ester, Noemi, and Ruth. There was a fourth sister – but she disgraced the family by running away with a man and having a baby. And then dying.

It’s years later, and that man has grown up. News reaches the sisters (and Efix) that Giacinto intends to come and meet his aunts – and perhaps stay with them. He brings with him a youthful recklessness that threatens the life that the Pintor sisters have made for themselves. And Efix is determined not to let him do that.

I really enjoyed reading this novel. The supporting characters all rather blurred, and even the three sisters didn’t have the most distinct personalities, but the chaos caused by a cuckoo in the nest is handled so well. As life becomes upturned, we see family secrets coming to life, and the community around them being outraged and enjoying the outrage. There’s a section where Efix is forced to live away from the community that is perhaps less strong, and feels rather out of Deledda’s range of experience and observation – but anything in the small Sardinian landscape is captivating.

I’m not usually one for landscape descriptions, and I don’t remember any specifics, but Deledda certainly conveys the atmosphere of the environment really well. And you can feel how essential the land and its produce were to the self-sufficient community. There is a benevolent claustrophobia to it all, that can lose its benevolence as soon as something shifts in the ecosystem, or your standing slips in the social rankings. It’s vivid, and Martha King manages to keep that vividness in the translation – that has the added difficulty of being translated more than eighty years after the original was written. It never feels jarring in period or tone.

Equally interestingly laced through the narrative is the folklore and faith of the community – the superstitions that guided their understanding of the world, thrown lightly into sentences. There is no complex theology here, or even a faith that would be recognised by outsiders, but the sort of daily fears and hopes that have been passed down through generations, unimpeded by outside influences – and that would disappear in the next few decades. I think Deledda is better at communities than individuals, but perhaps that was more important in this novel. It’s a fascinating snapshot.

Naomi by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (25 Books in 25 Days: #25)

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Finished! Hurrah! I managed a book a day for 25 days, even though one of those wasn’t read in the single day, and two were under 50 pages. And 23 of them have had people’s names in the title, for #ProjectNames! I’ve gone out on a rather more respectable 233 pages, because I’ve been on public transport for quite a lot of the day – specifically, Naomi by the Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.

It was serialised in the 1920s, finishing in 1925 (after a brief time in the wilderness when one magazine stopped publishing it), and translated by Anthony Chambers in the 1980s. Sakura (who blogs at Chasing Bawa) very kindly gave me a copy when we met up in 2016, and she was right to think that I would really like it.

The narrator Joji is 28 when he meets the 15-year-old Naomi. He is an ordinary office worker, but is beguiled by the concept of the ‘modern girl’ – which, in the Japan of the 1920s, was apparently somebody who had Western facial features, wore Western clothes, admired Western furniture, and ate Western food. (Goodness knows what counted as Western food in 1920s Japan, because I can’t think of a lot that American, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish food has in common.) I should say I am lifting the word ‘Western’ from the novel – it is repeated often, in a way that is quite uncomfortable to read. The narrator takes for granted that everything Western is better than everything Japanese, and I couldn’t work out whether Tanizaki was satirising this viewpoint or passing it on without question.

Taken by her sophisticated name, he believes that Naomi can be moulded into the sort of person he would want to marry – and moves her into his house as a sort of maid, until such time as they know each other well enough to be wed. As she begins to develop and learn, and have access to more money and opportunities, the power dynamics of their arrangement subtly and very gradually start to shift…

That’s a very brief look at a psychologically fascinating novel. The modern reader is a lot more in sympathy with Naomi and her independent spirit than with Joji – who is somehow both affectionate and controlling, naive and modern, conservative and cultural. He is not a straightforward villain by any means, and I’m sure he was still less meant to be in 1924/5. This is a really nuanced and intriguing look at what happens when people live together whose outlooks and purposes are not quite compatible – and all about how power and effect work within a marriage. And how illusions can fade, but still be too appealing to abandon.

On the train, I deliberately sat opposite her so I could take another good look at this woman named Naomi. What was it about her that made me love her so much? Her nose? Her eyes? It’s strange, but when I inspected each of her features in turn that night, the face that had always been so appealing to me seemed utterly common and worthless. Then, from the depths of memory, the image of Naomi as I’d first met her in the Diamond Cafe came back to me dimly. She’d been much more appealing in those days than she was now. Ingenuous and nave, shy and melancholy, she bore no resemblance to this rough, insolent woman. I’d fallen in love with her then, and the momentum had carried me to this day; but now I saw what an obnoxious person she’d become in the meantime. Sitting there primly, she seemed to be saying, “I am the clever one.” Her haughty expression said, “No woman could be as chic, as Western-looking as I. Who is the fairest of them all? I am.” No one else knew that she couldn’t speak a syllable of English, that she couldn’t even tell the difference between the active and the passive voice; but I knew.

I think the novel was a bit shocking when it was first serialised. It’s not now, but the tautness and captivation of the writing has remained, and I thought this was wonderful. Thanks Sakura!

Melville by Jean Giono (25 Books in 25 Days: #7)

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I loved The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono when I read it years ago – a beautifully simple story – and have been meaning to read more Giono ever since. I did start Hill once and didn’t get very far, but 25 Books in 25 Days seemed like a good opportunity to read Melville (1941 – translated from French by Paul Eprile).

It started life as the introduction to Giono’s translation of Moby Dick, and can very loosely be said to be about Herman Melville. But this Melville is very much of Giono’s own invention, as Edmund White explains in his helpful introduction to the NYRB Classics edition. Which is, incidentally, beautiful. Giono’s Melville is solidly masculine and determined, and his life is shaped partly by visions of an angel who encourages him to write the novel that is in his heart – and an Irish nationalist called Adelina, who apparently didn’t exist.

Did I enjoy the book? I don’t know, really. It is very overblown, stylistically, in a way that feels deliberate. It is impressionistic and philosophical, interlaced with conversations that are often very funny. It is more of a word picture than a narrative, and swirls around like the waves hiding Moby Dick. Yes, it was often beautiful. But it was more of an experience than a narrative, if that makes sense. I think I should re-read it one day.

He was seeing clearly. He could say it to himself, there, alone in his bed, while a broad smile moistened his whiskers: “I don’t live to keep an eye on my commercial interests. I live to keep an eye on the gods.” What’s more, he’d be ready to earn his keep, starting tomorrow if necessary, doing no matter what kind of work, even something other than writing. Not a “man of letters” in the least.

On this evening, he felt strangely free, strangely decided. He called out softly, “Are you there?” No, the fire was dying out. The embers were crackling, that was all. “That one,” he said, “as soon as he wins, he takes off. Well, as soon as he believes he’s won, because – hold on a minute there, boy! – it hasn’t been stated yet that I will write this book.”

Truly, he didn’t feel he was capable of it, unless he had a real change of heart. He looked at the sailor’s clothes he’d just bought, lying over there on the armchair. What’s he scheming? he thought. What does he have in store for me? What’s he going to turn me into?

Proust’s Overcoat by Lorenza Foschini (25 Books in 25 Days: #5)

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I’m a sucker for any book that deals with the writer’s fascination with another writer, and I imagine that’s why I picked up Proust’s Overcoat in 2015. It was published in Italian in 2008, and translated into English by Eric Karpeles in 2010, and is (of course) about a Frenchman, so it has been round the geographic houses. And I read it on the train, on the way to meet up with a Canadian – specifically Clare from The Captive Reader.

In the case of Proust’s Overcoat, it is not Foschini who’s obsessed with Proust, though she is certainly beguiled by learning more about him. Rather, her tale is largely about Jacques Guérin and his obsession with Proust. Guérin was the inheritor and manager of a very successful perfume manufacturer, but his private life was spent in gathering what he could of Proust’s papers and possessions.

Foshcini winds together the outline of Proust’s life, chiefly looking at his relationship with his doctor brother Adrian, with the account of Guérin – who knew Adrian, and used this tentative connection to get access to what was left of Proust’s possession after A. Proust’s widow burned them. It could have made a much longer book, so it’s interesting that she chose to make it such a short one. I almost never want a short book to be longer, even when I’m not doing 25 Books in 25 Days, and I was happy for this one to be a snapshot – almost a curio. And threaded throughout is that fur-lined overcoat – from which Proust was apparently inseparable, summer or winter. Foschini’s book opens with her seeing it, and closes with mention of it in the discussion of Proust’s legacy.

That legacy is broad and interesting, and Foschini’s little book forms an intriguing, unusual, and oddly charming corner of it.

The Silence of Colonel Bramble by Andre Maurois (25 Books in 25 Days #3)

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I read and enjoyed The Thought Reading Machine by Andre Maurois during my DPhil, and when I came across The Silence of Colonel Bramble last year, that fact and the title were enough for me to pick it up. It was published in French in 1918, and in English the following year – translated by Thurfrida Wake (great name), with the occasional verses translated by Wilfred Jackson. My appendix has the original French poetry, and my bad French is good enough to know that his translations were very approximate.

Published just after the First World War, this novella is based on Maurois’s experiences of spending the war with a British contingent of the army. Bramble was a composite character he created, and the silence of the title refers to the archetypal British colonel’s reticence – that Maurois believes contains eloquent multitudes.

This was an enjoyable and interesting view of a certain subsection of soldiers at a very significant period of time, though it doesn’t really qualify as a novel or even a novella. While there is a plot of sorts, it’s pretty much a series of vignettes and aphorisms, tied to characters.

“We are a curious nation,” said Major Parker. “To interest a Frenchman in a boxing match you must tell him that his national honour is at stake. To interest an Englishman in a war you need only suggest that it is a kind of a boxing match. Tell us that the Hun is a barbarian, we agree politely, but tell us that he is a bad sportsman and you rouse the British Empire.”

(The poetry is incidental and rather pointless.) It’s always fun to see one’s nation’s stereotypes held up to the light by somebody from another country, though in the case of Bramble et al, I hope they’re antiquated by now. All the nonsense about honour and sportsmanship has hopefully died out, though I wouldn’t be so sure. And I do wonder what the differences are about reading this as a Frenchman in French as opposed to an Englishman in English. But it is very good-natured and affectionate, filled with the comradeship of having just ‘won’ a war together – and enough amusing and down-to-eath in amongst the jingoism to still make for good reading.