I’m very late in announcing this month’s readalong title. Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows isn’t a war novel per se. It’s a post war novel. I found it’s about time to have a look what state countries, which had participated in WWII, were left in after the war. Russia is decidedly one of the most interesting places when it comes to the post-war era and Grossman is famous for the way he captures this time. Like many other Russian authors Grossman’s novels were forbidden during the Soviet era. Everything Flows was written after his major work Life and Fate. I have seen a few of his books reviewed on various blogs ( Silver Threads on Life and Fate – A Work in Progress on Armenian Sketchbook – Caravana de Recuerdos on Life and Fate) and the feedback was always more than favorable.
I’ll leave you with the b blurb and the first sentences.
Ivan Grigoryevich has been in the Gulag for thirty years. Released after Stalin’s death, he finds that the years of terror have imposed a collective moral slavery. He must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. Grossman tells the stories of those people entwined with Ivan’s fate: his cousin Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, Pinegin, the informer who had Ivan sent to the camps and Anna
Here are the first sentences
The Khabarovsk express was due to arrive in Moscow by 9 a.m.. A young man in pyjamas scratched his shaggy head and looked out of the window into the half-light of the autumn morning. He yawned, turned to the people standing in the corridor with their soap boxes and towels and said, “Well, citizens, who’s last in line?”
I will be reading the German translation Alles fliesst. I have this idea that Russian works better translated into German.
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The discussion starts on Monday, 28 October 2013.
Further information on the Literature and War Readalong 2013, including all the book blurbs, can be found here.
Alexander Baron was once known as the great British novelist of WWII, but since then he’s been somewhat forgotten. Three of his novels are “war novels”. There’s No Home is one of them. For a novel about WWII it’s surprisingly peaceful and deals with a lesser known aspect of the war. When the allies invaded Sicily, and drove back the Germans to the Italian mainland, some of the troops were granted a few months of peace and quiet during which they lived among the Sicilian civilians.
There are different POV characters in the novel, but the main story focuses on Sgt Craddock. He’s the type of soldier liked by everyone, superiors and inferiors alike. He’s married with a little kid. Being away from home, first in combat and now in this eerie state of peace among the Sicilian civilians makes home seem like another world, a world far more foreign than Sicily. When he meets Graziella, falls in love with her and lives with her, almost as if they were husband and wife, only with far more openness and directness than he’s ever known with his wife, his own life in England moves farther and farther away.
The love story between Craddock and Graziella, is the only coherent story line, the rest is made of anecdotal episodes, either about civilian life or things that happen among the soldiers during the time in Sicily. The war and the fighting are far away, but eventually, they have to move on, go back to fighting and leave everything that has become dear to them.
It’s easy to see that Baron wrote from his own experience. Only someone who spent time in Italy, among Italians would be able to capture so many details, render such lifelike scenes. In the afterword we read that Baron was “adopted” by an Italian family while in Sicily, visited them often, ate with them. Most soldiers, not only those who had an Italian lover, formed close relationships with the population.
The book describes some of the absurdity of war, but it’s toned down. During this time of rest, the absurdity is felt the most in the treatment of deserters. It’s no coincidence that we have three deserters in this novel. A British, soldier, an Italian and a German one. Their treatment is very different.
I liked the way this book was written a great deal. It’s written in such a precise but effortless style, you barely notice you are reading, it felt much more like watching a movie. I appreciated that Baron chose a topic that may seem marginal to the war but that was interesting and rendered with great warmth. I suppose you could read his three war books like a trilogy, each showing another aspect of what Baron experienced during the war. After having read this novel on civilians and soldiers in repose, I’d like to read one of his other novels, From the City From the Plough, telling the story from the POV of an infantryman in combat.
There’s No Home was the ninth book in the Literature and War Readalong 2013. The next is the post-war novel Everything Flows by Russian writer Vasily Grossman. Discussion starts on Monday 28 October, 2013. Further information on the Literature and War Readalong, including the book blurbs can be found here.
I’m nearing the end of my Austen journey. Now that I have read Mansfield Park, I’ve only got Persuasion and her short fiction left. I was surprised to like Mansfield Park so much as I know it’s not a favourite of many. The reason for this is to some extent its heroine Fanny Price. I wouldn’t go as far as saying I liked Mansfield Park better than Pride and Prejudice, but it may come in second, before Emma.
The story can be summarized briefly. Three women make three very different marriages. Mrs Price gets married to a poor man who likes his drink too much. She bears him some 12 children, one of them is Fanny. Lady Bertram marries a very rich man, owner of an impressive country estate, Mansfield Park. The third, Mrs Norris, lives near Mansfield Park with her husband in a small parsonage. The two ladies often speak about their unfortunate third sister who lives in Portsmouth in squalor and one day Mrs Norris urges the Bertrams to send for Fanny, who is about ten years old, and suggests they raise her at Mansfield Park, together with her four older cousins, Tom, Edmund, Maria and Julia.
Fanny is extremely timid but over the years she is doing well. She grows up to be an educated and very pretty young woman. She’s secretly in love with her cousin Edmund who was the only one who was nice to her. Edmund has decided to join the clergy as being the younger brother he will not have a lot of money to live on. A lot of the Bertram’s money comes from the colonies and when the plantations don’t do so well, Sir Bertram travels to Antigua with his older son.
Mrs Norris who is a widow by now had to vacate the cottage for the new pastor, Mr Grant, and while Sir Bertram travels to Antigua, Mary and Henry Crawford, the younger brother and sister of Mrs Grant, arrive and set in motion a series of dramatic events.
If you know Austen well, you know that all of her heroines are tested. Some more, some less, but in the end they are always rewarded and the reward is a happy marriage.
Fanny Price is a unusual heroine because she comes from a very poor family and the way she is treated by the Bertram’s is often quite shocking. Especially the unlikable Mrs Norris lets her feel daily that she is an inferior. Fanny reminded me much more of a Dickens character and when she is sent back to Portsmouth, as a form of punishment, towards the end of the book, it’s even more Dickensian. I don’t think we find such a close up of a poor family in any other of Austen’s novels. But Fanny Price is unusual for other reasons. She is so timid and fearful and very frail as well. I was surprised to find the portrait of a highly sensitive person who even shows some signs of what used to be called neurasthenia. She has to be careful at all times; she catches colds more easily than others, she’s more easily exhausted. Her symptoms are never as pertinent as when she stays in Portsmouth. She suffers from the noise, the dirt and the smells far more than anyone else would. I have seen her called passive by people but I would say she is quiet and withdrawn, she’s not so much a dreamer as a thinker. Sure, to some extent she is passive, but if you are told daily that you are nothing, that you have to be grateful, that you have to stay in the shadow, then it’s hard to be any other way. Even if she is passive, I don’t think she has a weak mind at all. When they want to force her to marry Henry, she opposes this strongly.
I think a lot of the dislike of Fanny Price stems from her opponent Mary Crawford. I saw people mention that they like her far better than Fanny. When the book was written, she was clearly one of the negative people but we, with our 21st Century mentalities, can’t help but like her and find a lot of what she says quite reasonable. I don’t think I spoil the novel if I mention that it is also about adultery. From our point of view Mary’s reaction to this event is understandable, but when the book was written it was quite shocking. I think small elements like this show very well why many people prefer a historical novel set in 1814 than the real thing because a writer of historical novels would take our mindset into consideration.
Mansfield Park has one of my favourite villains Mrs Norris. She’s a self-centered, selfish and cruel person and tries to exclude Fanny from every little bit of joy, denies her a fire in her room and reminds her constantly that she is an outsider. I loved to hate her and the end is so rewarding.
Mansfield Park has a minor flaw. It is Austen’s longest novel but it’s not long enough. I felt the end was rushed. Many of the most important scenes happen offstage and the final emotional developments happen too quickly. I wasn’t surprised when I watched the ITV production right after finishing the book to see, that those elements were shown in the film while the first parts were compressed. I can’t remember if Austen rushes all of her endings like this. I found it a bit disappointing, which doesn’t mean I preferred the movie version. Not at all. It’s OK but not great and it contains a lot of major changes.
I think that when people write unkindly about Fanny Price, they seem to forget that being adopted into a rich family, means that you are leaving your family behind. Being cut off from what you know, not seeing your beloved brother for years, must be a terrible shock, no matter how stately a home you get in exchange. The story of the little girl Fanny Price who became a delicate but strong heroine has moved me. It’s a rags to riches story that I wouldn’t have expected from Austen. Most of her heroines marry well and improve economically through their marriage, but they don’t start out being as destitute as Fanny.
I can only speak for myself but I feel pretty much the same as Updike and mostly agree with the full quote below which is taken from an interview with Lev Grossman in Time magazine in 2006 (you can find the whole interview here)
I think America is an increasingly book-free country. In the world of my boyhood, there were books everywhere. Your piano teacher had books, and there were lending libraries everywhere–your department store had a lending library. Books are still bought, and you see them being read in airplanes, but it’s a last resort, isn’t it? And the category of “literary fiction” has sprung up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books, and if anybody wanted to read them, terrific, the more the merrier. But now, no, I’m a genre writer of a sort. I write literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit. I was hoping to talk to America, like Walt Whitman, you know? Address it and describe it to itself.
I have seen quite a few debates circling around the questions about the end of literature and/or what “literature and literary fiction” means. Is it so-called literary fiction that is about to end? The modernist novel? Surely nobody can say that story telling will end? And what is literary fiction anyway? Isn’t that an absurd expression? For me, being a French/German native speaker the term “literary fiction” is an oddity. In French and German it is much more pragmatic. Literature is pretty much the same as what English-speaking people call literary fiction. If you want to be precise you can add “demanding”, “challenging” or “sophisticated” or to describe the opposite “entertainment”. Or you can add a school or movement like “nouveau roman” which already excludes “genre”. But that seems to be a continental European perception.
Lately I came across a term I found even more absurd “literary genre”. It was used for books like Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. In German we would call that “gehobene Unterhaltungsliteratur” , meaning sophisticated entertainment literature. It’s a term used to tell the interlocutor that you’re not exactly reading trash, but nothing too demanding either.
In his extremely interesting book Writing 21st Century Fiction (I’ll need to review that some day), literary agent and writer Donal Maass argues that “literary genre” is the thing of the moment. I’d say it’s nothing new, it’s just another word for bestseller or mainstream fiction. Because being slightly more literary than the average genre novel, without being crime/fantasy or romance, but accessible and well constructed, has always been the recipe for bestsellers.
In any case, literature is still alive and kicking, whether genre or literary. What seems to be dying is the patience of the reader, hence the popularity of so-called “readable” fiction, which means a lot of different things like simple sentences, short paragraphs, many chapters etc. Probably one of the many legacies of TV and other newer media that can be asborbed quickly. It’s no surprise that a lot of the current bestellers have been written by MFA graduates. They are well-constructed, have a stronger emphasis on metaphors and similes and take the short attention span of the reader into consideration.
Do you agree with Updike? Do you think literature is dying? And what about the terms literary fiction and literary genre?
My cat, as you can see, couldn’t care less. Maybe he has a point.
I wanted to read Philippe Claudel since years and looking for a WWI novel I came across his Grey Souls – Les âmes grises. Like most of his other books the novel has been translated into 25 languages and was generally liked by readers and critics. From what I know so far, the war is not predominant in the novel. It’s more like the starting point to a crime which is solved much later. From some of the reviews I got that it’s quite heavy and brooding.
Here is the blurb
This is ostensibly a detective story, about a crime that is committed in 1917, and solved 20 years later. The location is a small town in Northern France. The war is still being fought in the trenches, within sight and sound of the town, but the men of the town have been spared the slaughter because they are needed in the local factory. One freezing cold morning in the dead of winter, a beautiful ten year old girl, one of three daughters of the local innkeeper, is found strangled and dumped in the canal. Suspicion falls on two deserters who are picked up near the town. Their interrogation and sentencing is brutal and swift.
Twenty years later, the narrator, a local policeman, puts together what actually happened. On the night the deserters were arrested and interrogated, he was sitting by the bedside of his dying wife. He believes that justice was not done and wants to set the record straight. But the death of the child was not the only crime committed in the town during those weeks.
The first sentences:
I don’t really know where to start. It’s quite difficult. All this time that has gone by, which words will never bring back, the faces too, and the smiles, the wounds. Still I need to try to say it. Say what’s been bothering me for twenty years. The remorse and the big questions. I have to cut open the mystery with a knife, just like a belly, and sink my hands in, even if that’s not going to change a thing.
The book has been made into a movie but I don’t know whether it’s available in English
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The discussion starts on Friday, 30 August 2013.
Further information on the Literature and War Readalong 2013, including all the book blurbs, can be found here.
Assia Djebar’s novel Children of the New World – Les enfants du nouveau monde is set during the Algerian War of Independence or Algerian Revolution which lasted from 1954 – 1962. If you are not familiar with this war wikipedia gives a short overview. It was a so-called decolonization war between France and Algeria. The war was fought in many different ways, guerrilla warfare, maquis fighting, terrorism and extensive use of torture on both sides.
The war in Algeria is still controversial in France. While it is meanwhile called “a war” and not only a “pacification intervention” – or whatever euphemism was chosen at the time – many of the aspects of the war are still not spoken about openly. One of them being the “interrogation techniques”.
It was a complex war that ripped apart the Algerian society. I think Assia Djebar showed this well in her novel. She chose to write Children of the New World as a series of vignettes, each with the name of a protagonist as title. Upon closer inspection we see that these are not individual stories but that each is a piece of a puzzle forming a kaleidoscopic canvas, which is apt and nails the Algerian society of the time. This was a society that resembles a broken pot, still held together at the seams, but the cracks showed and covered it like spiderwebs, ready to burst at any moment.
I have read the one or the other critique of this book stating it wasn’t really about the war, which puzzles me no end. The war is everywhere in this book, in every page. Every relationship is influenced or distorted by it. Neither love nor parenthood, nor friendship, nor anything else is free of the war’s influence.
We don’t see the fighting, that takes place outside of the city, in the mountains, but the people see burning farms from afar, they see bombs fall and at the opening of the book, one falls on a house in the city, killing and old woman.
The book also shows how hostile this society was and how it was almost impossible to make a difference between enemies and allies. There were so many good and bad people on both sides. Not every Algerian was for the Algerian cause, not every French person was against it and many on both sides were against the use of torture and violence.
I have never read about any war in which torture was used this extensively. This becomes clear in the book too, although, mercifully, we find no descriptions, but we hear of people who don’t survive interrogations, of others who hear them scream in their own cells.
As said, the war is omnipresent in this book but Djebar transcends it and gives us more than just a society at war with itself and its oppressor. It shows a traditional society undergoing change and what this change means, notably for its women. I loved the many different descriptions of women’s lives. The diversity is amazing and in its best parts Djebar’s writing is as detailed as a documentary.
This was Assia Djebars third novel and it’s said that it’s not her best. I suppose that is correct as there are many structural problems. Djebar makes intense use of analepses , still I got the impression there were a lot of time-breaks that were not entirely wanted.
I’m curious and want to read another of her novels some day. She’s an interesting writer, with a raw unpolished force that I found quite refreshing.
For those of you interested in movies on the Algerian war – here’s a list that will also guide you to some of my reviews.
Children of the New World – Les enfants du nouveau monde was the seventh book in the Literature and War Readalong 2013. The next is the WWI novel Grey Souls aka Les âmes grises by French writer Philippe Claudel . Discussion starts on Friday 30 August, 2013. Further information on the Literature and War Readalong, including the book blurbs can be found here.
Daniela Krien’s debut novel Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (German title: Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen) was a success in Germany and has already been translated into 15 languages, one of which English. That’s why I thought I’d like to see for myself if it’s really that good. I’m not sure the book won me over as a whole, but I liked a lot of the elements and the end packs a real punch.
The narrator Maria is a young woman of 16 who is living with her boyfriend Johannes on his family’s farm. It’s 1990 and the Berlin wall has just fallen. The novel begins shortly before the reunification of Germany. What makes the story interesting is that it’s set in Eastern Germany and that we see the end of the former Democratic Republic through the eyes of the people who lived there. The author grew up in the country, in the former DDR, so she knows what she’s writing about.
It’s odd that Maria is living with her boyfriend’s family and not with her own but we learn later that the mother has been left and that Maria can’t stand her sadness anymore. It’s far livelier on the Brendel’s farm. But even though it’s livelier, there are tensions as well, and just like in her own family, there are family secrets.
Maria and Johannes are still going to school but Maria stays at home most of the time, hiding somewhere, reading Dostoevsky. She’s often sad as well, prone to mood swings, but she is a keen observer and a kind girl. She want’s to help and make her stay worthwhile for everyone.
Not far from the Brendel’s farm is the farm of the Henners. Henner is a forty-year old guy, a brute, as they say, a man whose wife couldn’t stand his company anymore and who has left him. He’s said to be violent and drinks like a fish. He comes to the Brendel farm occasionally because they have a small farm shop. Maria watches him and Marianne, Johannes’ mother. Marianne seems to have a bit of a crush on him. Maria herself is fascinated and before long, without thinking of the consequences, she’s having an affair with him.
Their love affair is one of those dark maelstrom passions. They try to fight it but to no avail. Maria feels extremely guilty, but at the same time she cannot let go. What they share is too deep. It’s passionate, violent, but it’s also more than that. Henner opens up, tells her his life story.
At first their affair is all about sex but later they are content to just read Dostoevsky and Trakl together. Henner even tries to get sober.
They way this is told is quite appealing. The beginning is strange but after a while, you feel sucked in and read more and more quickly.
I have never read a novel about the end of the former Democratic Republic from the point of view of someone who lived “over there”. I really liked how Daniela Krien captured this. Just imagine: one day the authorities decide that your country will not exist anymore. Even though it might be for the better, it would still be a shock. There are many small details which show that and they are well rendered.
I was surprised that Maria was allowed to live with her boyfriend’s parents and that they shared a room and a bed, but then I remembered that the attitude towards sexuality is said to have been much more liberal in the former Democratic Republic. I watched a talk show on German TV a few years ago with athletes from the ex-DDR and they mentioned that for them one of the strangest things was how sex was handled in Germany. They said they preferred partenrs who came from the former Democratic Republic because they were more liberated. Judging from this novel it certainly seems as if there had been quite a difference.
The title is a Dostoevsky quote taken from the Brothers Karamazov. The book contains a few quotes from Dostoevsky, others are taken from Hamsun. Henner repeatedly quotes Trakl’s poem Song in the Night. Trakl is an Austrian poet. His poems are beautiful but gloomy.
If you like dark love stories you’d like Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything. You might equally like it if you have an interest in country life or life in the former Democratic Republic of Germany. The style is quite simple, most sentences are short. It’s not subtle but it works. The whole story is carried by the narrative voice, which I found haunting. The end alone makes it worth to read the book.
Beauty is a Sleeping Cat 