a gallimaufry

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Let’s skate over the fact I haven’t posted here for aaages and move on to this odd little novel, which I have just finished reading. I picked it up entirely because of the cover, which struck me as sweet but faintly unsettling too, and that cover sums up the novel itself extremely well. The protagonist, Keiko Furukura, has a narrative voice that is sweet and naïve, affectless almost, but this voice seems to suppress a sharper one, really quite dark, which surfaces now and again.

After eighteen years, Keiko is the longest-working member of staff at the Smile Mart convenience store at Hiiromachi Station in Tokyo. She has always felt herself to be an outsider, and she tells us of two incidents when she was a child which proved to her that she didn’t understand other people at all, and that she needed to be ‘cured’, somehow:

My parents were at a loss what to do about me, but they were as affectionate to me as ever. I’d never meant to make them sad or have to keep apologizing for things I did, so I decided to keep my mouth shut as best I could outside home. I would no longer do anything of my own accord, and would either just mimic what everyone else was doing, or simply follow instructions.

This is how she lives and for her, working in the convenience store is liberating. When it first opens, she says:

At that moment, for the first time ever, I felt I’d become a part in the machine of society. I’ve been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.

Being a normal cog in society means memorising the store manual, mimicking the other members of staff and taking everything about the workplace culture absolutely seriously. Every day she is the most enthusiastic participant in the morning practice session, when the staff line up and shout out the phrases they use with customers (‘We pledge to provide our customers with the best service and aim to make our store the beloved choice of store in the area!’; ‘Certainly! Right away sir!’; ‘Thank you for your custom!’). She checks the weather forecast to see how that will influence the lunch choices of the store’s clients. An untidy display upsets her deeply, and she will always do her best to reach the sales goals of the latest promotion.

It is ironic that Keiko finds herself and her freedom in the mindless platitudes and corporate rules of the convenience store. A new employee, Shiraha, sneers at the morning practice session and tells Keiko it’s like a religion. ‘Of course it is,’ she replies. Her days are an endless round of performing services, care even, for the store: replenishing the stock, tidying the shelves, serving the customers and fretting for its well-being. It is a sort of organism.

Keiko’s relationship with the store goes further. When she says she is reborn there, she means it almost literally. The food and water she consumes come from the convenience store. Her speech, behaviour and clothing are all copied from the other members of staff there:

My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues […]
My speech is especially infected by everyone around me and is currently a mix of that of Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara. I think the same goes for most people. […] Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.

This idea of infection between the members of the store staff is not really repeated in Keiko’s discussion of wider society. But it reinforces the idea that they are simply cells or smaller organisms serving a larger host. One day a disruptive customer is ejected from the store by the manager:

A wave of relief passed through the store, and the morning atmosphere returned to normal.
A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment where foreign matter is immediately eliminated. The threatening atmosphere that had briefly permeated the store was sept away, and the customers again concentrated on buying their coffee and pastries as if nothing had happened.

When Keiko cannot sleep, she thinks of the convenience store ‘the transparent glass box that is still stirring with life even in the darkness of night’. She keeps fit and healthy so that she can work efficiently and well at the store. She hears its voice in her head.

It is conformism. But we are shown Keiko’s society outside the store – her family and friends – and they are increasingly putting pressure on her to conform to their ideals. Working in a convenience store when you’re thirty-six and a graduate is demeaning, in their eyes. She should either get a ‘proper’ job, or marry. Towards the end of the book, Keiko realises something about her sister Mami:

She’s far happier thinking her sister [Keiko] is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine.

‘I’m a convenience store worker, a cog in society. This is the only way I can be a normal person,’ Keiko says. Normal people have social codes she doesn’t understand; the store’s rules are clear for her to follow. For eighteen years she is able to successfully repress herself, pass herself off as a ‘normal’ person and find a sort of freedom. Some religious regimens are like that: you rise through the repeated practices to a spiritual liberation. Yet now the rules have changed and her ‘normal’ act is itself perceived by her family as not acceptable any longer. They want a different normal for her, but one that she cannot give them. Thus, weirdly enough, Keiko’s choice to continue working in a convenience store becomes in the end not quite an uncomplicated act of defiance, but at least a conscious choice of the kind of conformism to which she wishes to adhere.

 

The Pendragon Legend, by Antal Szerb; translated by Len Rix

For weeks Belgium has lain under a thick grey cloud, our lives occasionally enlivened by a few hours of rain, no sunshine, no snow, just greyness. At such a time, what could be better than The Pendragon Legend, the first novel of the Hungarian writer Antal Szerb, published in 1934. It is gothic, comic, romantic, mysterious and utterly charming. It would be satirical, if satire was too strong a word for its affectionate, gentle mockery: it loves what it laughs at. It includes a ghost, ancient books, the Rosicrucians, north Wales, a ruined castle, a disputed inheritance and sinister goings-on. I love it and re-reading it has cheered me up no end.

Perhaps you too recognise the feeling that is described here? It is the moment when our narrator, János Bátky, first claps eyes on the precious Pendragon library:

I was filled with the tenderness I always feel – and which nothing can match – when I encounter so many books together. At moments like these I long to wallow, to bathe in them, to savour their wonderful, dusty, old-book odours, to inhale them through my very pores.

János Bátky is a Hungarian scholar with an interest in the esoteric. At a party he falls into conversation with the Earl of Gwynedd, a recluse who shares his enthusiasm for Robert Fludd, and is invited to stay with him at Llanvygan Castle and examine his library of priceless manuscripts. Reading up about the Pendragon family (who are the earls of Gwynedd), Bátky befriends an Irish adventurer and fantasist named Maloney who, coincidentally, is also bound for Llanvygan in the company of Osborne Pendragon, the Earl’s nephew. But before they leave, a mysterious telephone caller warns Bátky to stay away.

At Llanvygan Bátky accidentally offends the Earl and so does not see much of him. Most of the Earl’s time is devoted to experiments with some gigantic axolotls he has bred and through whom he hopes to find the secret of the resurrection of the body and eternal life. Bátky enjoys his days in the library, especially when accompanied by the beautiful Cynthia, Osborne’s sister, but his nights are considerably less enjoyable, interrupted by a midnight rider with a flaming torch charging around the castle. Someone is trying to murder the Earl, there is a crazed prophet in the village, and the ruins of Pendragon Castle on the hill above hold a secret that may shed light on the mysteries, if only Bátky, Osborne and Maloney can find it.

So, melodrama, mystery and eccentrics a-plenty, all spiced with lashings of humour. It’s a book that doesn’t take itself seriously, like its narrator. As the quote about his feelings for libraries suggests, Bátky is sensual as well as scholarly, easily distracted by a beautiful woman. He is clever and curious but weedy, given to experiencing life through books and ill-equipped to face the more physical dangers the situation in Llanvygan foments. The telephone call almost puts him off even starting for Wales, and it is only academic vanity that spurs him on. He struggles to climb a cliff during a nocturnal escapade with Maloney and Osborne, and at a crucial point gets lost on a Welsh mountain because he cannot tell the difference between beech, birch and oak trees. He is a frightful snob and romantic and it is these qualities that support him and drive him on rather than any nobler attributes. He is somewhat in love with the idea of the British aristocracy, to put it mildly.

Here he is, experiencing that mainstay of gothic fiction, an eerie noise at night in a castle:

Anyway, I switched the light on. The room was now at least two hundred years more historic than when I had gone to bed. I had seen rooms like it in London museums and French chateaux, but then there had been guides and written inscriptions to direct one as to what to imagine [..] But none of the elaborately carved wardrobes in this room carried any such source of enlightenment. Nothing tied the imagination to what was merely informative and comforting. For all I knew, some ancestor might have died in here, repenting his unspeakable crimes amid horrific visions ... And all the while, there came this unceasing sound: tap, tree-ee, and the terrible sigh. [...]
Of course, I realised it must be a window, or something of that kind, producing the noise. On many a windy night the same battle had been waged between an unsecured window and my fevered imagination.
I knew that, whether I wanted to or not, I would have to go and investigate. I knew my habits of mind: until I did that, I would have no rest.
I got out of bed, donned my dressing gown and quietly drew back the door.

There is a clever balance here between self-deprecating humour and true creepiness, no mean feat to achieve. For underneath the jolly japes, the endearing eccentrics and the madcap pace, we glimpse a darkness: besides the horror of banal, lucre-worshipping criminality there arises the horror of an evil less easy to comprehend, and one which speaks to ancient terrors. Where does legitimate pursuit of truth end, and obsession and madness begin? At what point does the past grip the present too tightly? Dreams, prophesies, stories, lies, all have their own truths. The novel plays delicately too on bodily and literary immortality; it concludes with a sense that there are indeed mysteries that can never fully be understood.

The Pushkin Press edition which I read was translated by Len Rix so beautifully that not only does it flow as easily as if it had been written in 1930s English, it also captures Bátky’s personality and dry wit perfectly. The whole book is an absolute joy.

(Portrait of Antal Szerb, from the Pushkin Press website; Szerb was a Hungarian Jew and so his literary career was destroyed and he was murdered in a forced labour camp in 1945)

 

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, and The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

I read a lot of books which I never write about here. For one thing, it takes me aaages to write a post, I’d never keep up with my reading. For another, even if I enjoy a book, I don’t necessarily have anything to say about it – other than, ‘I think it’s really good’.

In the last few weeks I’ve read two novels which fall into this category. I don’t have anything to say about them, other than, ‘I think they’re really good’. And both have been widely reviewed, so you can easily find out more about them elsewhere. Why bother to even write this, then? Well, perhaps you’ve walked past one – or both – of them in a library or bookshop and almost picked them up – and after reading this post, you might decide next time to actually pick them up and have a look.

The first one is Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. Gyasi was born in Ghana and brought up in the US, and this is her first novel – or short-story collection, since each chapter concerns a different member of the same family and builds on what has come before but is also entirely self-contained. The novel opens in the late eighteenth century with Effia, born during a fire in Fanteland (in present-day Ghana). Effia’s mother, Baaba, seems to hate her and ruins her chances of marriage to the young chief Abeeku. Instead, Effia marries James Collins, a white Englishman, and is taken to the Cape Coast Castle. In the dungeons of the Castle languish slaves, awaiting transport to the plantations in the most horrific conditions. One of these slaves, we discover in the next chapter, ‘Esi’, is a young woman who is Effia’s half-sister.

In alternating chapters we follow each generations of these two branches of the family. One, Effia’s, remains in west Africa; Esi’s endures slavery and finally freedom in the United States. On the one side, Quey becomes a slave trader and his son flees that life; on the other, H works the mines in Pratt City and Willie longs for a career as a singer. Through their stories of hardship, hope and grief, the history of the slave trade and its consequences right up to the present day are traced. Much of it is very sad but also fascinating, as each character struggles to carve a life and a destiny from what they have inherited. They are fiction, but they stand in for real people and this makes their suffering more appalling.

The other book is probably the most stressful novel I have ever read: The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated by Philip Boehm (the German title is Der Reisende). It’s Kristallnacht and Otto Silbermann, a wealthy Jewish businessman, belatedly realises he needs to flee Germany. Forced to escape from his apartment as Nazi storm-troopers bang on the door, he makes for the railway station. Can he escape?

The novel is amazingly tense. We are kept close to Silbermann, we feel his emotions and follow his trains of thought as if they are ours. Every encounter could lead to Silbermann’s arrest. ‘Don’t trust him!’ you are muttering as he engages someone in conversation. ‘Keep hold of your suitcase!’ Apart from keeping you on the edge of your seat, the great strength of this novel is that it shows how everyone, including Silbermann and we readers, becomes implicated in the horrors of Nazism. Silbermann does not ‘look like a Jew’. He resents how his non-Jewish friend Becker is embarrassed – afraid even – to be seen with him, and we resent this too. ‘Help him!’ But then, when Silbermann meets more ‘obviously’ Jewish people, he is anxious and we are anxious too – and then, Silbermann tries to distance himself just as Becker tries to distance himself, and we accept that too because we fear for him. And everything is all the more stressful because we ‘know’ what will happen to most of the Jewish characters, and even though they are fictional, they represent real people who really died. Just as in Homegoing. And the tension of The Passenger is maintained right up until the very end.

Madame de, by Louise de Vilmorin, translated by Duff Cooper

This is a little book I chanced across in a second-hand bookshop in Sutton Hoo a few weeks ago. Published in 1952, it was illustrated by Ian Ribbons so charmingly that I bought it, knowing nothing about the author or the book.

I was staying with my parents who take The Times and serendipitously the very next day an interview with John Julius Norwich was printed in it. John Julius Norwich is the son of Duff Cooper, translator of this little novel, and in the interview he mentioned Louise de Vilmorin as a French ‘poetess’ (!) and the mistress of his father while he was British ambassador to France.

Next stop Wikipedia. Disappointingly the main focus of de Vilmorin’s entry is fixed upon the men in her life rather more than her achievements. Marie Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin was born in 1902 into a wealthy family who had made their fortune a seed company, Vilmorin. First she was engaged to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; then she married a rich American, Henry Leigh Hunt, and then she married a Count Paul Pálffy ab Erdöd. She was also mistress to André Malraux and Count Paul Esterházy de Galántha (who left his wife for her though they never married). Her correspondence with Jean Cocteau was published after her death in 1969 and she counted Sadruddin Aga Khan among her friends.

About her work, English Wikipedia says in a slightly bizarre non sequitur:

She was afflicted with a slight limp that became a personal trademark. Vilmorin was best known as a writer of delicate but mordant tales, often set in aristocratic or artistic milieux.

There’s more detailed information on the French-language version of the site.

Madame de was made into a film, The Earrings of Madame de, directed by Max Ophüls (and I can see it would make a very good film); at least two of her thirteen other novels were also filmed. In France it seems she is best known for Madame de and Julietta. She published six collections of poetry (three posthumously), one of which, Fiançailles pour rire, was set to music by Francis Poulenc. (You can listen to it here.) Her work was notable for its use of holorimes (more about those in this article by Miles Kington ) and palindromes, and in 1949 she received the prix Renée Vivien for her poetry. She wrote film scripts and dialogue for several films, including Les Amants directed by Louise Malle, and acted in a couple of others. Louise de Vilmorin, it transpires, was a well-connected and talented woman of letters and I feel rather embarrassed that I had never heard of her before.

(Louise de Vilmorin photographed by Cecil Beaton in 1955, from here)

And what of Madame de?

Elegance rather than beauty was accounted the mark of merit in the circle of society to which Madame de belonged and in that circle Madame de herself was acknowledged to be of all women the most elegant. She set the fashion among those who knew her and, as the men said she was inimitable, sensible women sought to imitate her. They hoped that some glint of her lustre might shine on them, and that their ears might catch some echo of the adulation she received. Wherever her approval fell, distinction was conferred; she was original in all her ways; she made the commonplace seem rare, and she always did what nobody expected.

Madame de is a wealthy woman of fashionable nineteenth-century French society. (I surmise this: there is mention of travel by carriage but also by train, and of the possibility of a duel.) Or rather – she is a wealthy wife; her husband gives her money for her expenses. Although he is ‘proud of his wife’ and never questions her or stints her,

yet from a sort of weakness, not unmixed with a desire to prove her cleverness, when he admired some object she had just bought or a dress she was wearing for the first time, she could not resist saying that it had cost her half of what she had actually paid for it.

Unsurprisingly, over the years Madame de runs up massive bills which she cannot pay. Unable to bring herself to confess to her husband – I think we can all sympathise with how humiliating that would be – she sells a pair of diamond heart-shaped earrings to a jeweller in order to raise the money herself, and then she pretends to her husband – they were a wedding present from him – that she has lost them. And from this all the trouble starts.

Secretly selling the diamond heart-shaped earrings your husband gave you as a wedding present perhaps suggests that your marriage is no longer as happy as it once was. And Monsieur de has a mistress (of whom he is tiring), a mistress whose existence he conceals from his wife. He buys the earrings back as a parting gift to the mistress. The novel follows the travels of the earrings, given and sold, always coming back to Monsieur and Madame de. As they pass through different hands, the lies and sorrow in the couple’s lives accumulate and the earrings’ symbolism becomes more charged with each exchange, each layer of deceit and emotion and misunderstanding. Initially cold and frivolous, Madame de falls in love and even discovers herself capable of kindness.

Although Madame de is so short and not one single character is ever given a name, it carries a weight and depth which is testament to Louise de Vilmorin’s skills as a writer. She has certain expectations of her readers: that they will be able to recreate the nineteenth-century milieu in which it is set, obviating the need for lengthy description or explanation; that they will be familiar with Madame Bovary and perhaps also Anna Karenina. Isak Dinesen’s short stories also spring to mind, and the work of Lesley Blanche, I think they all share similar sensibilities. The book is, like Madame de herself, beautiful and elegant. I don’t know if any more of her work has been translated, but I should like to read it.

 

The Woman and the Puppet by Pierre Louÿs, translated by Jeremy Moore

One of the benefits of sorting through my books, rearranging them and pretending I’m going to get rid of some – no, the creating more shelf space aspect isn’t going too well – is that I am excited all over again about the books I have. And squirrelled away in a forgotten corner of the TBR mountain was this 1898 novel by a Belgian novelist, Pierre Louÿs, which I bought when I lived in Crouch End a very long time ago indeed. I have to say I bought it entirely for its cover, which shows Marlene Dietrich in The Devil is a Woman, a film loosely based on this novel. The Woman and the Puppet itself draws on an episode in Casanova’s Memoirs and on Bizet’s Carmen, according to the cover copy.

In the novel, a Frenchman, André Stévenol, is enjoying the carnival in Seville when he glimpses a mysterious and very beautiful woman. On his way to a rendezvous with her he encounters his friend Don Mateo, who knows the woman, Concha Perez, well – very well. In fact, he has had a long and complicated affair with her, and his recounting of this forms rest of the novel (bar the final chapter).

Don Mateo first sees Concha on a train when they’re travelling through snowy, moonlit mountains. He is thirty-seven, she is fifteen. He calls her a child, but emphasises her womanly characteristics – her well-developed bust, her mouth. She sings rude folk songs and fights with a gipsy. Six months later, he meets her again, this time in Seville, at a cigar factory, where hundreds of women work for a pittance. Because the factory is so hot, most of the women (except for those Don Mateo calls ‘the prudes’) work stripped to the waist. Don Mateo visits the factory to ogle the women – and since he’s allowed to walk around alone, without a supervisor, as a ‘special favour’, it is pretty clear that this is not his first visit for this purpose. He is surprised to find Concha there – she is fully dressed – and they flirt a bit and he gives her some money and she takes him home to meet her mother.

Very quickly Don Mateo becomes besotted with Concha despite her youth, and visits her every day, showering her with money so that she no longer has to work in the factory. Concha teases him, and seems to enjoy his company. After three months, he takes her mother aside ‘and spoke to her quite frankly and in the most pressing terms’.

I told her that I loved her daughter, that I intended to join my life to hers, and that although, for obvious reasons, I couldn’t agree to any kind of openly acknowledged relationship, I was nevertheless determined to let her share in a deep and exclusive love to which she couldn’t possibly take exception.

And yet Concha does take exception to this magnanimous offer and she and her mother disappear.

But the following spring, when Don Mateo is returning from the theatre, he hears someone calling his name from a barred window – Concha. She offers to become his mistress. Joy! But... every time he visits her, she’s feeling unwell, or wearing special drawers with reinforced gussets, or... Then she says,

‘My sweet, can’t you just be satisfied with everything I’ve already given you? [...] my entire body is yours to hold and caress [...] Isn’t it enough, all that? In that case, perhaps it’s not me that you love, but only what I refuse to let you have? Any woman can give you that, so why ask it of me, of someone who resists? [...]

Thus every night I held in my arms the naked body of a fifteen-year-old girl who may have been brought up by nuns, but whose social status and moral disposition ruled out any idea of physical purity on her part. [...] There could be no conceivable excuse for putting on such an act, and none was given.

Don Mateo soon sees himself as the puppet of the title, being played by this girl. But he can’t resist her resistance, he is drawn to what he sees as her purity – manifest in her (extreme!) youth, her protests, that convent upbringing – and her sensuality – anyone from that class must be a hussy! she’s a Moor and all Moorish women are like that, and she is getting naked in bed with him. In case you were wondering, Don Mateo has a low opinion of women, perhaps as a result of his encounters with Concha Perez, who behaves more and more outrageously as the novel progresses. He is made profoundly uneasy by the thought of a lot of women spending time together – either in the boarding house in Cadiz where the dancers lodge together, or in the Seville cigar factory where hundreds of women work for a pittance. What do they talk about, these women? (Depravity, obviously.) What do they get up to? (Depravity, again.) ‘I hardly dared imagine what might be going on in such a city of women.’ A woman’s physical allure is her great asset – Don Mateo notes that because Spanish women mature so fast, they are only beautiful for a brief time – and after that, it is understood, they are no longer interesting to him. His attraction to and obsession with Concha is entirely physical, and her interpretation of his attraction to her I quoted above seems entirely accurate. If he is a puppet, it’s only because he allows himself to be.

(Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Straw Maniken, 1791–92; Museo del Prado; Don Mateo refers to it while lamenting how Concha treates him)

Concha teases and torments Don Mateo with a glee that is very pleasing. It seems there is nothing she cannot do and then explain away (and I was amazed at how frank this novel was about her activities). She extracts a lot of money from him, even a house; there is always an element of calculation in her and she is a brilliant opportunist. She lies so much and so cheerfully that it is impossible to tell when she’s being honest or quite what her feelings are, yet over the course of the novel she seems to acquire a dependence on Don Mateo which is not only financial. And Concha knows poverty and desperation and what options are available to women to scrape a living – which Don Mateo, with his private income, cannot comprehend, not that he ever bothers to try. I found the final twist a bit disappointing and unworthy of the sort of person I had imagined Concha to be, but in terms of the play of power and humiliation in which the two characters engage over the course of the novel it makes a sort of sense and is an interesting surprise.

The author, Pierre Louÿs, wrote what Wikipedia charmingly calls ‘delicately obscene’ poetry and a volume of prose poems by a friend of Sappho’s, Bilitis, which he pretended to have translated but had in fact made up. He was friends with André Gide, Claude Debussy and Oscar Wilde; he has drawn praise for his depiction of lesbianism and female sexuality; he was honoured as Officier de la Légion d’honneur and The Woman and the Puppet has inspired five film versions, including Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. It seems odd, therefore, that he’s not better known in English – though perhaps the sauciness of much of his work is offputting to Anglo sensibilities...

A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali, by Gil Courtemanche, translated by Patricia Claxton

‘Monsieur Valcourt,’ Cyprien [who is HIV positive] began, ‘I’m going to tell you what always gives you such a long, serious face. I’m going to be very straight with you because you know everything about me. You’ve got everything out of my head with your questions. You even know my sickness better than me, and you explain it to me. [...] What I want to say is, you get us thinking. We feel from your eyes what you see in your head. You see dead bodies, skeletons, and on top of that you want us to talk like we’re dying. I’ll start doing that a few seconds before I die, but until then I’m going to live and fuck and have a good time. [..]
Monsieur Valcourt, in your head I’m already dead and gone. And you’re right. A few months more, a year maybe. Every day I carry on, I’m stealing time from God, who’s waiting for me and doesn’t hold a few accidents against me. But you don’t stop wanting to live and do things right just because you’re dying.’

Between April and June 1994, about 800,000 Rwandans – mainly from the minority Tutsi tribe – were slaughtered, principally by the majority Hutus, in a genocide which shocked the world. Gil Courtemanche’s fictionalised account of what happened – for the characters in it are real, their fates actual, this is not entirely fiction nor entirely history – opens just before this, at the swimming pool at the Hotel Milles-Collines in Kigali. Most of the clientele are expatriates – French paratroopers, Belgian and Canadian aid workers, a UN general – but rich Rwandans are also present, and prostitutes, many HIV-positive, around whom the men hover like vultures. With grenades exploding in the city and militias maiming and murdering Tutsis, everyone including the foreigners knows what is coming. Valcourt, a Canadian journalist who has been trying and failing to set up a national television service, is repeatedly warned to leave the country. In love with the beautiful Gentille, who is a Hutu but looks like a Tutsi, he is told that his White skin won’t necessarily protect him because of his affinity with ‘cockroach’ Tutsis.

The tensions between Hutus and Tutsis have always existed, but were stoked by the Belgian and German colonialists who favoured the tall, slender and lighter-skinned Tutsis over the darker Hutus with their flatter noses, believing them to be racially superior. Gentille’s grandfather was Hutu but slim and pale; his father paid for his education and married him to a Tutsi in order to improve his lot. Since your ethnicity is handed down to you on your father’s side, Gentille remains officially a Tutsi, but her identity card will not protect her.

But the country is also being ravaged by AIDS, although this is officially denied. The dead can hardly be buried fast enough, the graveyards are not big enough. For someone like Cyprien, who knows that is HIV positive and that he’s on the Hutu death list, death is imminent: the only question is whether it will be a slow one from disease or a brutal yet quicker one from a Hutu machete.

This is not a novel to enjoy. Most of the men are predatory and cruel; a Belgian businessman throws a Rwandan prostitute out of his window as if she’s a bit of rubbish. Even the White doctors are only interested in their Rwandan patients insofar as they can profit from them by advancing their careers. Women are defined by how sexy they are; even Gentille, a principal character, is circumscribed by her beauty, her sexual allure and her Tutsi-like features. This and the author’s rather clinical tone of cold fury made it possible for me to read as far as I did because they created an emotional distance between me and the characters but, I have to admit, I didn’t finish this novel. I couldn’t. I read about half and then even though I had skipped over the most graphic violence, I reached a bit where what would happen to Cyprien’s orphaned children was described and I felt too sick to continue. I wasn’t surprised by the horror, it is what had put me off the book for so long, but I was appalled at how clearly it was known in advance by everyone – foreigners included – what was going to happen, and the level of atrocity with which the Tutsi were already accustomed to live.

It is hard to evaluate a book that mingles fiction and fact and that deals with such horrific material, and since I didn’t finish it my opinion is very limited. If you are interested, you can find a more useful review by Giles Foden in the Guardian. Let me know in the comments if you would like to have my copy.

Fairy Tale, by Miroslav Holub

He built himself a house,
                his foundations,
                his stones,
                his walls,
                his roof overhead,
                his chimney and smoke,
                his view from the window.

He made himself a garden,
                his fence,
                his thyme,
                his earthworm,
                his evening dew.

He cut out his bit of sky above.

And he wrapped the garden in the sky,
and the house in the garden
and packed the lot in a handkerchief
and went off
lone as an arctic fox
through the cold
unending
rain
into the world.

(Translated from the Czech by George Theiner, from The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, 1972)

brexit and brontë

(Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before
I swore – but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.

Illustration by Niroot Puttapipat of Quatrain 70 of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, trans. Edward Fitzgerald;
London, Folio Society, 2009; found here at the artist’s blog)

It’s been a little while since the last gallimaufry of links and, since I’m not feeling like writing (periodically, all the hate, violence, greed and intolerance in the world make me despair as I’m sure they do you and this is one of those times), here are a few posts you may find interesting.

For those of us despairing at the sheer depressing idiocy and duplicity that has characterised the Brexit debate on both sides, yesterday’s frolics on the Thames provided some light relief even as it reinforced doubts about the nation’s sanity:

One day, years from now, when I’m sitting in my armchair by the fire, my son will come up to me and ask, ‘Daddy... what did you do during the EU referendum?’

And I’ll put down my newspaper, remove the pipe from my mouth, and I’ll say, ‘Well, son. I went on a boozed-up boat trip down the Thames with Nigel Farage while men from Ukip shouted ‘Get a job!’ at Bob Geldof as he flicked V-signs at them from a pleasure cruiser and Scottish fishermen squirted water at rival campaigners in a dinghy and Members of Parliament gazed from the Commons in disbelief and 100 people on a bridge sang Rule Britannia.’

(Michael Deacon in the Telegraph; there’s a paywall so if you can’t access it, do read his tweets about it instead, they are hilarious)

If you are concerned about refugees, do consider signing the UNHCR’s petition urging governments to protect them and ensure their rights. (via Neil Gaiman)

It’s not often there’s good news about the environment, but here’s a nice story about Văcărești, an abandoned plot of urban wasteland in the heart of Bucharest which has been reclaimed by nature.

Spanish Lit Month 2016 is around the corner in July. As I am reliably unreliable when it comes to any sort of readalong (cough, Little, Big) I am planning to read Julián Ayesta’s Helena, or The Sea in Summer because I believe that even I can manage 124 pages in 31 days. (Although I’m not quite confident enough to add my name to the list.) Richard is also co-hosting a readalong of The Man Without Qualities; I would love to join in as I’ve meant to read this for ages but see above, unreliable. I have a collection of Musil’s short stories so might indulge in a Sympathy Read.

And 165 years after dining with Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë has been cleared of a ‘dress gaffe’ (though not of contributing to a ‘gloomy and silent evening’.

(The dress Charlotte didn’t wear, from here)

shiny inbetweeny

As I’m sure you already know, the latest Shiny New Books is online and packed with reviews and interviews and an Advent quiz. I’ve already forgotten that Christmas involves buying presents for other people and identified about twenty books I want for myself. I defy you to be more altruistic if you click through.

I have written two reviews this time. The first is of Marina Warner’s Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. I didn’t actually write ‘perfect stocking-filler’, but... The second is The Portrait, the English translation of a powerful Dutch novel by Willem Jan Otten. Although short it wasn’t always an easy read, but it poses some interesting questions. And the narrator is a canvas.

The Angelic Avengers, by Pierre Andrézel/Isak Dinesen

(Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen at her desk at home in Rungstedlund, 1955; from the archives of her Danish publisher, Gyldendal; found here)

Recently I read a biography of Isak Dinesen by Judith Thurman (and very good it was too). Thurman naturally enough discusses Dinesen’s work and the circumstances which gave rise to it, and of course discussed the only novel she published, The Angelic Avengers. This was written during the war while Denmark was under the ‘protection’ of the Nazis; Dinesen just made it up as she went along for ‘a little fun’, in contrast to her manner of composing her tales, which involved much more polishing, and published it in Denmark in 1944 under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel. (I don’t know if there’s any significance to Andrézel, it makes me think of donkeys! Because of the French âne and Dutch ezel.) The press quickly discovered the author’s true identity, although Dinesen steadfastly refused to admit she had written it, and it was judged by the standard of her tales and savaged. Perhaps because this experience was so upsetting, perhaps because she herself felt that the book was substandard, Dinesen only publicly acknowledged The Angelic Avengers as a work of hers in an interview with the Paris Review in 1956 (the English translation, which she made herself, was published in 1946 and 1947 when she was desperate for money; another possible reason for her to distance herself from it).

Intrigued by this, I ordered a copy at once! I must say that I think the savaging was completely unjustified, although yes yes, her tales are greater works of art. Perhaps it is to Dinesen what Orlando is to Virginia Woolf. It’s fun, a playful gothic tale of damsels in distress that’s perfectly suited to these chill dark days. It is set in Victorian England and is indeed quite silly, but there is more to it than pure melodramatic escapism and it is all written in Dinesen’s delightful, elegant prose.

[Zosine] once more turned towards the others. ‘No one, no one on earth,’ she passionately exclaimed, ‘can realize what I have gone through, what I have experienced during these days and nights! It is a terrible thing to be deceiving all the people round you! But at the same time it has in it a kind of fascination. It is an affair to exert all one’s faculties. It is a fatal game; it is wicked, I believe! But still it is a game, one feels as if one might go on for ever! But now I am more tired than I had thought it possible to be! It is when danger is over that one sits down to die. I am happy, but my strength has gone, and I am changed! I believe I have grown old!’

Orphaned Lucan Bellenden, daughter of a scientist, is forced to flee her position as a governess by the unwelcome proposition of her employer. She seeks refuge with her schoolfriend, the wealthy Zosine. However, Zosine’s fortunes are about to change drastically, and the two girls try to find work via a London agency, through which they are selected by the philanthropic, kind Reverend Pennhallow and his wife to be their companions in place of their lost daughter and receive a proper education. But all may not be as it seems – dah dah daaaaah! (For once I’ll try not to spoil the plot.)

The oppression of women is a core theme in The Angelic Avengers.The two girls must support each other and save themselves from the dreadful fate which awaits them. The masculine world is portrayed as threatening and exploitative. A male employer may propose that his children’s governess become his mistress, and her only recourse is flight (Dinesen admired Jane Eyre and there are many references to it in The Angelic Avengers: here the Mr Rochester figure is abusive). Without a male protector, young women are vulnerable; poorly educated but not working class, their avenues of employment are few and mainly labelled ‘governess’. Men devise, run and are the consumers in the (female) white slave trade. Of course the girls end up happily married at the end (I don’t think that’s a spoiler!) to nice young aristocrats whose inherited fortunes seemingly are not founded on the pain of other human beings, but in a nice twist on the traditional fairy tale of the hero who wins a princess at the conclusion of his adventures, these young men are very much rewards for the heroines’ bravery and spiritual strength rather than active helpers or interesting characters.

For when the girls face a terrible evil, the young men are no help at all, nor is the rich papa. The only support Lucan and Zosine receive comes from another woman, an apparently mad black former nanny, even more dispossessed than they, yet courageous and loving. The central moral question the book poses through their plight is: how does one respond to evil, particularly when one is powerless? Zosine and Lucan each find slightly different answers to that question. Revenge, as it turns out, causes moral sickness in the administrator. The book argues that the destruction of evil requires forgiveness and compassion. This cannot have been an easy message to write or to read in ‘protected’ and post-war Denmark.

This is a melodrama, and thus there are a lot of extremes and far-fetched elements, some of which involve playing  with literary conventions and expectations of the gothic. In another echo of Jane Eyre, the fortune of Zosine’s beloved papa has been built up in the West Indies – on slave labour. Through Olympia, the nanny, Dinesen shows this distressing basis to European wealth: yes, Dinesen’s language isn’t what we would use today, and Olympia herself doesn’t question an order in which she is expected to serve, but her story of the horrible white man feeding on slave flesh is a vivid metaphor for the exploitation of the black West Indians by the whites. Whites preying on blacks, men preying on women: the nineteenth century is an ugly time.

Despite all this, The Angelic Avengers never takes itself too seriously. Something Zosine says to Lucan has been picked out as an epigraph for the novel, and it’s very fitting:

You serious people must not be too hard on human beings for what they choose to amuse themselves with, when they are shut up in a prison, and are not even allowed to say that they areJane Eyre prisoners: if I do not soon get a little bit of fun, I shall die!

Oh, and I’ve just discovered that it was made into a film in the US in 1948!

(Images are of the British and Danish covers of the first editions of The Angelic Avengers.)