26 Books

One of the most important of the Oulipian writers, Georges Perec is best known for Life: A User’s Manual – a collection of interlinked stories about the inhabitants of an apartment block – and A Void – a novel most famous for having been composed without the use of the letter e. The translation, which repeats the feat, is well worth reading.

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (Penguin Classics)

Georges Perec
Penguin Classics 2008, Paperback, 320 pages, £10.99

This volume collects Perec’s non-fiction work, though ‘non-fiction’ is perhaps not the best term for such a parade of flights of fancy, odd word games and barely-contained lunacy. There’s also a clever Borgesian short story, ‘Le Voyage d’hiver’, in which an academic searches for the provenance of a mysterious book.

This is a remarkable and profoundly sad book. It is set in Italy during Word War II and focuses on the struggles of ordinary people to survive among the rubble, violence and poverty.

History

William Riviere (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2002, Paperback, 768 pages, £14.99

Ida Mancuso is half-Jewish and lives in Rome. As the Axis powers become aware that they are losing the war, so the violence against their racial enemies accelerates. In one remarkable scene, Ida runs through the now deserted ghetto, drawn there as we feel compelled to touch a plate we have been told is hot, and ends up at the railway station, just as the final train is being dispatched to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and as the train leaves, one of the deportees hands her a fragment of a note to his family which she carries around with her wherever she goes thereafter.

Javier Marías is an Anglophile Spanish writer who has had a niche audience in the UK for a while now. Recently his work has attracted more notice, particularly his trilogy Your Face Tomorrow of which this is the concluding part.

Your Face Tomorrow

Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)
Chatto & Windus 2009, Hardcover, 560 pages, £18.99

This is by far the longest part of the work, and it has much more action than the other parts, although that’s not setting a terribly high bar, since very little happened at all in the first two parts. Marías is fond of the run-on sentence and at times his writing because almost Proustian, ambling as it does through multiple clauses before ending somewhere far removed from the sentence’s origin, and there is often page after page of parenthetical digression.

This Icelandic detective novel is the third in a series starring Inspector Erlendur, however, it was the first one to be published in the UK. To further add to the confusion, it’s also available under the title Jar City, which was also the name of the film based on the book.

Tainted Blood

Arnaldur Indridason
Vintage 2005, Paperback, 224 pages, £6.99

Erlendur is investigating the murder of an elderly man, found dead in his flat with a cryptic note left on his body. Were it not for the note, it would appear to be a burglary gone wrong. Some of Erlendur’s colleagues suspect burglary anyway but Erlendur knows better and finds a link between the man and the death of a young child 40 years earlier.

If I hadn’t made the mistake of trying to read J.M.G. Le Clézio’s tedious and dreadful Terra Amata, which remains unfinished and therefore unreviewed, The Kindly Ones would easily be the worst book I’ve read this year. Unlike Le Clézio’s stinker, Littell’s book is at least readable in the literal sense, but it has no virtues beyond that.

The Kindly Ones

Charlotte Mandell (Translator)
Chatto & Windus 2009, Hardcover, 992 pages, £20.00

Max Aue is a homosexual member of the SD, a committed Nazi and an active participant in the holocaust. He is present, Forrest Gump-like, at virtually every significant event of the war, from the massacre at Babi Yar to the battle of Stalingrad (which he is transferred into after the Germans’ encirclement is complete), to the fall of Berlin.

This is the translation of The Castle that I mentioned in my review of J.M. Coetzee’s Stranger Shores, the first from the text as Kafka left it. The Castle was, like all Kafka’s novels, unfinished at his death, and was prepared for publication by his friend and literary executor, Max Brod. Brod’s view of Kafka’s work has clouded it in layers of biography and sainthood for decades, his approach being to smooth the rough edges of the fiction and laud the private man.

The Castle

Mark Harman (Translator)
Random House Inc 1999, Paperback, 352 pages, £10.99

Like most people, I first read Kafka in Edwin and Willa Muir’s translations. Mark Harman praises those translations in his introduction to his own, but it’s difficult to see them as anything other than unacceptable in the light of the new text.

The Post Office Girl was left unpublished at Zwieg’s death, and it’s perhaps easy to see why; it’s not the masterful miniature that one is familiar with from Zweig’s other novellas.

The Post-office Girl (New York Review Books Classics)

Joel Rotenberg (Translator)
The New York Review of Books, Inc 2008, Paperback, 224 pages, £7.99

It’s a rather heavy-handed critique of capitalism and of class, things that for sure require criticism but need a somewhat more subtle treatment than this. Christine is a lowly Post Office worker in a provincial Austrian town, who suddenly receives an invitation to stay at a luxury hotel with her aunt.

I sat down to read this collection of Tolstoy’s (mainly) later stories, and immediately felt as if I was in the company of a great and wise old friend. Tolstoy’s humanity is all-encompassing, and even though these stories are mainly from the period after his religious crisis and conversion, his deep moral sense is still universal. It would be easy to dismiss these stories on the basis of their overtly Christian content, but Tolstoy’s idea of Christianity was certainly unique, and probably closer in many ways to Buddhism than anything else.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories (Vintage Classics)

Leo Tolstoy
Vintage Classics 2009, Hardcover, 528 pages, £25.00

Many of the stories here are concerned with sex, and the nature of sexual obsession. The most powerful of these is The Devil, in which a member of the Russian aristocracy is brought low by his obsession with a peasant woman. Tolstoy wrote two endings to this story, both of which are presented here, although the one in which Irtenev commits suicide is clearly the better of the two in my mind.

Also in the collection are the famous The Kreutzer Sonata, Master and Man, the title story and Hadji Murat, all of which are superb.

Master and Man is a little masterpiece, having just two characters, and being astonishingly concentrated. For the entire story, both Vassily Andreich Brekhunov (master) and Nikita (muzhik) are lost in a blizzard, trying to get to the next village. Tolstoy never lets the action flag, despite moments of reflection, and still finds the time to give us insight into his protagonists’ souls. The scene in which Vassily Andreich decides to protect Nikita from the cold by lying on top of him, in which he finds spiritual peace and dies, stands comparison with the greatest scenes from Tolstoy’s oeuvre; Prince Andrei lying wounded on the field at Austerlitz, Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei on the ferry, or Levin and Kitty proposing to each other by miming the writing of letters on the table top (there are so many of these scenes in Tolstoy that I could go on and on).

The Kreutzer Sonata is reminiscent in many ways of Anna Karenina, in that it deals with marital infidelity, jealousy and their consequences, only in much more compressed form. Tolstoy is consistently able to give us scenes of great emotional power after only a few pages, scenes that would take another author hundreds of pages to develop.

Hadji Murat is in many ways an outlier, in that it deals with miliatry action in the Caucuses, and is not specifically religious, and I suspect that this is the thinking behind the translators’ (the excellent Richard Pevear and Larrissa Volokhonsky) decision to include the earlier and somewhat disappointing The Prisoner of the Caucuses. Like War and Peace, Hadji Murat is based on real characters and events, and in large part on Tolstoy’s own military experience. It’s a very modern tale, almost cubist in the way that it tells the story from multiple angles, never allowing us to see an overall picture of the entire story, constantly prompting us to fill in the gaps for ourselves.

Only The Prisoner of the Caucuses and Diary of a Madman are in any way disappointing (and the latter of these bears no comparison at all with Gogol’s great tale of the same name). The rest of the stories here are outstanding masterpieces of the short story genre, and are as great as anything Tolstoy wrote.

Tolstoy was a miraculous writer. While there are other writers who challenge the reader more, produce finer prose, and are more innovative, Tolstoy is a writer it is impossible not to love with all one’s heart. I recommend these stories to absolutely everyone.

Alone in Berlin imagines a resistance to Hitler consisting of a husband and wife team who write and distribute handwritten index cards with anti-Nazi slogans on them, prompted by the meaningless death of their son at the front. Although it was published in Germany in 1947, this is the first time it has been translated into English.

Alone in Berlin (Penguin Hardback Classics)

Michael Hofmann (Translator)
Penguin Classics 2009, Hardcover, 576 pages, £20.00

It’s a bit of a mixed bag, really. For a start, it’s far too long and unfocused. There are too many incidental characters, many of whom are introduced as though they are going to be central to the story, but who drift out of it again. The writing is patchy and often cliché-laden, and the tone is somewhat distant, almost supercilious.

It takes a long while for the book to reach its peak, but when it does so it’s well worth it. Otto Quangel and his wife, the card writers, are arrested by the Gestapo and subjected to round after round of torture, in a vain attempt to uncover a wider anti-regime conspiracy, but of course there is none. One wonders if this is a subtle rebuke to Fallada’s post-war German readers?

The original German title is Jeder stirbt für sich allein, which is literally “Everyone dies for themselves alone”, or, more idiomatically, “Everyone dies alone”. It’s understandable that the publisher would want to give the book context on the shelves by inserting the word “Berlin”, but Everyone Dies Alone would certainly be a more accurate translation.

On balance, I’m glad I read Alone in Berlin, but it’s very far from being the “rediscovered masterpiece” the publishers claim it to be. Irène Némirovsky this isn’t.

I had never heard of Clarice Lispector until I read Lorrie Moore’s review of Benjamin Moser’s recent biography of her in the New York Review of Books. It was a fascinating article on what seems to have been an equally fascinating life, and I decided to explore some of her writing.

The Hour of the Star (Black & White S.)

Giovanni Pontiero (Translator)
Carcanet Press Ltd 1992, Paperback, 96 pages, £5.95

The Hour of the Star is a small and intense novella. It takes almost half of its 86 pages to introduce the protagonist, a young girl called Macabéa who comes from the sticks and lives in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The first half of the book is an extended, rambling discussion on how to get the story started.

In many ways, it’s a frustrating book to read, and it’s hard to see how that’s anything other than deliberate. What saves it from the disastrous smugness that plagues so many post-modernist books is the sense of uncertainty, of struggle that is characteristic of Lispector’s writing.

Gradually, Macabéa becomes more and more real, and as she does so we become more and more sympathetic towards her. Lispector maintains a consistently ironic detachment, and a constant air of play.

The Hour of the Star is a strange little book, marvellous and inimitable, and I shall definitely return to it. Lispector is a beguiling author, an author I want to read more of.