Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were in movement; thOutside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the Left Bank.
Babylon revisited is a semi-autobiographical story in which Charles ‘Charlie’ Wales after a couple of wild years of living in Paris marked by loads of booze, partying and big spending returns to the city from Prague, where he went to live after the death of his wife, the stock market crash of 1929 and his own collapse. He humbly attempts to persuade his late wife’s family that he distanced himself sufficiently from his old life and is solid and sober enough to regain the custody of his nine-year-old daughter Honoria.
Babylon is a moniker for the immoral and roaring Paris catering to vice and waste as lived rambunctiously by Charles Wales and his late wife with their circle of American expat friends during the Jazz Age - the Babylon of perpetual temptation and sin.
It is a wistful story on the longing for and (im)possibility of redemption for missteps made in the past in which Scott Fitzgerald shows how the drink-demon wrecks and ruins dreams and lives. Once sobered up everything what drinking helped to forget viciously and mercilessly belches up: loneliness, anxiety, boredom – and the damage done. Whether Charlie Wales will manage to start afresh and bond again with his daughter and leave the loneliness, the past and the feelings of guilt behind without is not sure, but never the lustre of Paris in the old days will return. It is hard to bid farewell to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.
Nicole and André, a couple of recently retired teachers, travel for a second time to Moscow. They will speLitte misunderstandings of no importance
Nicole and André, a couple of recently retired teachers, travel for a second time to Moscow. They will spend time with André’s daughter from his first marriage, Masha, who helps her father with some work and learning Russian. Nicole feels sidetracked, old an useless and struggles with boredom. Sulking, the couple represses mutual grudges and friction but tensions rise now their stay in the city seems to reflect the veil of greyness that has descended over their common life and future, exposing political disappointment and fear of aging.
Who is to blame for their mutual misunderstandings and irrations, Nicole or André? Does it matter? Alternating between the viewpoints of André and Nicole, de Beauvoir does not take sides and evokes how both grapple with aging and desillusionment. Looking back at their personal life and choices, the disenchantment is enhanced by the confrontation with the real face of Soviet communism that refutes André’s political ideals and commitment. Nicole questions herself as a woman when observing the smoothness and ease in which the younger generation of women embrace their feminity in unison with their chosen role in the outside world, having it all – independence and natural womanhood, while she feels herself disappear as a sexual being – an experience of the crumbling of identity and emptiness taking over the self, on the other hand creating a new blank canvas to paint on with different strokes.
[image] (photograph by Antanas Sutkus, 1965)
Set in 1966, Misunderstanding in Moscow was written around 1965 and was due to be included in de Beauvoir’s short story collection The Woman Destroyed – the afterword explains it was likely replaced by the third story in that collection, ‘The age of discretion’, which was told solely from the perspective of the woman. The novella was posthumously published in 1992 and conveys some parallels between the fictitious couple and the lives of Sartre and de Beauvoir (their visits to the Soviet Union; the worries of Nicole because of the heavy drinking and smoking of André echo de Beauvoir’s on Sartre’s dangerously unhealthy habits mentioned in Kate Kirkpatrick’s biography Becoming Beauvoir: A Life).
The moon was shining, as was the little star which faithfully accompanies it, and Nicole repeated to herself the lovely lines from Aucassin an Nicolette: ‘I see you tiny star. Drawn closely to the moon.’ That’s the advantage of literature, she told herself: you can take words around with you. Images fade, become distorted, disappear. But she could still find the old words in her throat, precisely as they had been written.
Reflecting on memory, transience, the passing of time and its impact on longstanding relationships, the novella points out some of the difficult questions the need to find a new place in life after retirement engenders and invites the reader to think about how to sort out those questions for oneself, without scooping out any answers. The topics touched upon might seem bleak at first sight but de Beauvoir is remarkably and cheeringly optimistic on the ability to keep on dancing as a couple regardless of age and the experiences of loss such implies. (*** ½)...more
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry. (Georges Braque)
Braque avec Picasso comprises a short, lavishly illustrated essaReality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry. (Georges Braque)
Braque avec Picasso comprises a short, lavishly illustrated essay published in the wake of the retrospective on Georges Braque that was running in the Grand Palais in Paris and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 2013-2014. It was written by Pierre Daix, a journalist and an art critic who knew Picasso personally for over twenty five years and wrote a comprehensive study of his life and art (Picasso: Life and Art). I didn’t visit the exhibition, merely was tempted to read this slender book because it caught my eye when perusing the well-stocked bookcase of our host in Paris after visiting the permanent collection in the Centre Pompidou on the day of arrival. I was somewhat at loss when entering the spaces which seem pretty drastically redesigned since the last visit (in 2018) and so was relieved to recognise the reassuring presence of the Cubists paintings of Braque and Picasso in one of the first rooms, which I recall vividly seeing there for the very first time in 1993.
[image] (Houses at L’estaque (1908))
Following Cézanne’s death in 1906, a large exhibit of his works was shown in Paris the next year. This exhibition was an important inspiration for Braque and other artists. With this essay, Daix pays a moving tribute to the friendship between Braque and Picasso, documenting the dynamics of experiments, progression and discoveries that became known as Cubism. From their first encounter in 1907, when Braque was introduced to Picasso via the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Daix lucidly analyses and maps how they co-invented an co-created Cubism, how their continues artistic and interpersonal dialogue shaped their work and the role they both played propelling forward the cubist revolution they unleashed, influenced by Cézanne’s ultimate work and pushing it ever further by abstraction and the integration of materials and techniques like incorporating collage elements and papier collés (pasting coloured and printed pieces of paper) into their pieces.
Having both a different background – Braque, like his father and grandfather, first trained as a house painter and decorator while Picasso received formal artistic training from his father, an academic painter - turned out mutually stimulating and enriching. From the initial shock Braque experienced when confronted with Les demoiselles d’Avignon, they came to exchange thoughts and visit each other’s studios on an almost daily basis, culminating in a close collaboration which resulted in almost osmotic, interlocking works. Braque broadened the opening that Picasso had made by introducing geometry, stencilled letters and the contrasting of textures (sand, sawdust, iron filings) into their work.
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[image] (Braque and Picasso, Lee Miller, 1954) [image] [image] (Violin mélodie, 1914)
[image] (Nature morte à la chaise cannée)
In 1914 the dialogue between their paintings halts: Braque is sent to the war, while Picasso’s new interlocutor is now the painting Henri Matisse brings back from Morocco, the vibrant colours of Portrait de madame Matisse, pulling Picasso into a new lyricism, the lyric cubism of his harlequins. While Braque, wounded in the war, will continue on the chosen path and will explore Cubism until his death in 1963, Picasso breaks away from Cubism in 1917, integrating classicism and lyricism in his work.
Nonetheless, the parting of artistic ways didn’t mean the end of their friendship. In 1945, after Braque has undergone a serious operation and has to give up work for months, Braque’s wife Marcelle writes: ‘Picasso is one of the most faithful. He comes to spend the afternoon with us every day’. Daix points at one of Picasso’s paintings which was only discovered after his death in his studio, suggesting that Picasso never sold it because it reminded him of the times of closeness to his friends Apollinaire and Braque:
[image] (Reading the letter, 1921)
Having had a soft spot for George Braque since the first glimpse at his work and recalling attending a comical play in which an actor sled across the stage while quoting Braque, this essay encourages me to discover more about Braque’s artistic trajectory after the pioneering time (1907-1914) with Picasso and about his insights on life and art as expressed in his aphorisms. For a résumé of his artistic journey I plan to read Braque by Serge Fauchereau; for his own words I’ll turn to Le jour et la nuit : Cahiers de Georges Braque, 1917-1952.
En avant la musique… [image] (Guitar, Georges Braque)
During a short stay in Greece twenty years ago and wondering about which book to read on its history, a student of urban history gave me Modern GreeceDuring a short stay in Greece twenty years ago and wondering about which book to read on its history, a student of urban history gave me Modern Greece: A Short History(by C.M. Woodhouse) to read, a book which covered the period from the foundation of Constantine until the defeat of Papandreou and the eclipse of his socialism in 1989. Because The Shortest History of Greece: The Odyssey of a Nation from Myth to Modernity promised both a concise brushing off and a stretch to earlier history as well as the most recent political and economic developments in one compact volume, I was very much tempted by the title and scope of this book. Faithful to its title, The Shortest History of Greece: The Odyssey of a Nation from Myth to Modernity offers a fast-paced tour through three millennia of Greek history – encompassing the Greek peoples as well as the modern nation state - from the Bronze Age, ancient (archaic and classical) Greece, Roman rule, the Byzantine period, Ottoman rule, the birth of the modern Greek nation state, the turbulent periods of the wars (Balkan war, WWI, Greco-Turkish war, WWII, Greek civil war) the military dictatorship, third Hellenic republic until Greece in the Eurozone and the election of the first female president of Greece, Katerina Sakellaropolou.
As history education at school came chopped up in periods spread over the six years of secondary school, it was quite satisfying and enlightening to see some of the pieces stitched together chronologically – after our short foray into ancient Greece, I only remember Greece as such mentioned sidelong as the nation state that shortly after independence under the pressure of the great powers offered its throne to Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who turned the offer down to become the first king of Belgium in 1831 – Belgium also needed to import a king to make independence palatable on the international forum. As history is never finished, in a next update Heneage can add the death of Constantine II in January 2023. He was the last king of Greece, who was forced into exile in 1967 by the military rulers who later abolished the monarchy.
On the Greek revolutionaries rising up against the Ottoman Empire it was rewarding to see the puzzle piece of one of my favourite paintings of Delacroix falling into place:
[image]
Missolonghi was a human tragedy and a military disaster, but it inspired a masterpiece of propaganda at the very moment when it was needed. The great French painter Eugène Delacroix had already done his bit for the cause: at the Paris Salon of 1824 he’d presented his “Massacre at Chios” to the a horrified French public. Now, in just six months, he completed his Greece on the ruins of Missolonghi. The huge painting depicted a beautiful woman kneeling among the town’s ruins with her arms open in entreaty. People queued around the block to see it, and its message was unmistakable: Greece Needs You.
What particularly stayed with me from Woodhouse’s Modern Greece: A Short History were some of the remarkable dark pages in modern Greek history, the civil war, the Colonel’s regime. This time I was particularly struck by the mass population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1923 based on religious obedience which reminded me of what happened later in India and Pakistan with Partition. What followed after those harrowing times was admittedly less bloody and turbulent, but Heanage doesn’t shy away from more recent events which are in their own way also depressing, naming the despair and high suicide rates during the austerity the EU imposed and subsequent mass emigration, which, after the crisis, inspired the prime minister in 2019 to dedicate his administration to his children’s generation, of whom many still abroad, quoting an old Epirote song:
‘My migrant birds, scattered across the world, Your beautiful youth has grown old in foreign lands.'
The chronological exposé is interspersed with maps, illustration and paintings and small, instructive vignettes on specific themes, anecdotes and historical figures (e.g. on philosophy, Polybius, asides on “Apostles to the Slavs” Cyril and Methodius, the Elgin marbles) and garnished with quotes from classic historiographers to modern poets and composers (Theodorakis, Cavafy, Seferis).
James Heneage makes no secret of his adulation of what he considers the values of classic Greece. He definitely is a philhellene and sees fusion of civilisation as the gift of the Greeks to the world: Mycenaean with Minoan, Macedonian with Persian, Greek with Roman, Greek with renaissance European, substantiating his view with well-chosen quotes like this one on the powerful influence of Greek culture on the Roman Empire :
Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror (Horace (65-8 BCE)
Heneage’s admiration for the democracy of the polis of ancient Athens runs a leitmotiv through the book. He takes that concept of democracy as a touchstone and standard to assess later political institutions and organisations, including the challenges and threats in current times. Along his discourse he points out the differences in democracies of the direct versus the representative kind and which are the flanking conditions that are needed to underpin (direct) democracy: the values of education (paideia), thumos (our need to be valued) and philothimo (the honor that comes from the doing the right things) encouraging citizens to think of personal happiness as indivisible of that of the community, including future generations, unlike the representative democracy dominated by political parties that are vulnerable to takeover. He applauds small scale initiatives and experiments approximating his dream of the polis-style, direct democracy, like the one of the German-speaking community in East Belgium, which enables him to end on a positive, hopeful note.
As I am not knowledgeable in Greek history I cannot assess the quality of this book but thought it compulsively readable and well-written, living up to the expectations raised by the title and worth a second read in the future.
(I read an ARC of the North American and updated edition of this book, kindly provided by NetGalley, The Experiment and the author). ...more
Wrapping up 2022 solely from the angle of reading, it was a year that was book-wise mostly fulfilling, [image]
Books and cats, books and coffee, books.
Wrapping up 2022 solely from the angle of reading, it was a year that was book-wise mostly fulfilling, unless or maybe because it was another year of not really sticking to intentions (again not getting to re-read Nabokov or Proust, nor books that have been gathering dust on the shelves for years). Mood; serendipitous reading and numerous visits to the local library (and its unsurpassed reading café, my favourite place in town) took me to explore new and more familiar territory, discovering awesome new-to-me voices (Scholastique Mukasonga, Elizabeth Taylor). Fortunately there was also time to curl up loyally with old favourites (Patrick Modiano) and even to add a new favourite to my personal pantheon (Javier Marías) .
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Once more, some books that friends recommended to me turned out highlights of the year.
Short stories I do love reading short stories a lot, and thanks to Leonard’s initiative to start and moderate the (still ongoing) The Short Story Club lot of my reading consisted in short stories from Dana Gioia’s compilation The Art of the Short Story. Reading a short story every week not only offers a delightful variety, but also making me read more American authors than usual and quite a few which I hadn’t read before (Hawthorne, Cather, Stephen Crane). From the thirty-some stories we read so far I noticed that I most enjoyed reading more stories by authors that were already favourites (Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill, Anton Chekhov Misery, James Joyce, Araby)). Apart from the selection for the club, I also enjoyed short stories from Woolf, Mansfield and Kafka brought to my attention by my daughter and by friends: The Legacy, A Cup of Tea and Unhappiness). Toni Morrison's outstanding Recitatif - including the essay Zadie Smith wrote as a foreword - was another highlight.
Poetry I read very little poetry this year (apart from the poems friends posted on GR): a collection of Rilke, two collections by Louise Glück (Faithful and Virtuous Night, Winter Recipes from the Collective, the anthology Poems of Paris – and collections by Ingmar Heytze, Remco Campert and Menno Wigman.
Art Visiting Lille, Vienna and Paris and a couple of exhibitions running there this year made me read on Paul Klee, Egon Schiele and the friendship of Georges Braque and Picasso. David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring in Normandy, 2020 was memorable as well.
Paris played a role in quite a few books I picked, on purpose or by chance – or the link with Paris was obvious from the title or the subject (Met Parijse Pen, Willem Elsschot in Parijs, Parisians, Chopin, de Gaulle, the novels and the biography of de Beauvoir, Bove), or I was quite surprised of ending up there once again with a Swedish author, writing a novel mostly set in Göteborg but sending her characters to Paris in their student years (Lydia Sandgren, Collected Works).
Closing the year with Catherine Certitude and the illustrations from Jean-Jaques Sempé, once more I would like to thank all of you who make this such a wonderful place of friendship, support and inspiration by engaging into writing on and discussing books and life. Currently reading The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokly and thinking of what still is going on now we are leaving 2022 behind, the usual best wishes for the new year feel somewhat out of place, but I wish you all peace with these words from the Ukrainian poet Kateryna Kalytko:
War does not abolish the power of tenderness and love....more
It is monstrous to confuse love with revolution, night with day, life with death.
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From the title I assumed that Flowering Judas would be a It is monstrous to confuse love with revolution, night with day, life with death.
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From the title I assumed that Flowering Judas would be a story on betrayal – it brought to mind Judas Iscariot, the archetypical traitor – and there are a few allusions to that biblical figure, from the eponymous Judas tree that is associated with him to the suicide of one the characters in the story.
Told from the perspective of Laura, a young American woman who gets involved in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, it turned out a story of small and large acts of betrayal, ranging from a forbidden indulgence in lace and silk to the major ideals of the Revolution itself, personified in the nasty revolutionist leader Braggioni, who not only cheats on his wife and is greedy, vain and arrogant, but also doesn’t lend any hand to help the comrades that ended up in prison because of him.
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Swapping one religion – the Catholic faith – for another – socialism – Laura gradually perceives the same hypocrisy, corruption and flaws – whether in the leaders and in herself.
Katherine Anne Porter, politically involved in Mexico following the Mexican Revolution herself, seems to suggest that the path to a new world cleansed of cruelty and injustice, ruled by benevolent anarchy is as illusionary as the one to heaven – it is simply a road to nowhere, because of human nature.
The moonlight spread a wash of gauzy silver over the clear spaces of the garden, and the shadows were cobalt blue. The scarlet blossoms of the Judas tree were dull purple.
Numbers race through my mind. This is what the real, serious application of mathematics can give us. Happiness, comfort, hope. SenMaths and (dis)order
Numbers race through my mind. This is what the real, serious application of mathematics can give us. Happiness, comfort, hope. Sense and logic. And above all: solutions. Mathematics wins. Mathematics helps.
A humorous crime novel spiced up with ironic observations on love, death and risk assessment? And now for something completely different…
I don’t think I would have picked this if not for the reading club putting it on the reading list for this year. A few years ago we already read another farcical Finnish rodential novel - Arto Paasilinna's The Year of the Hare - and frankly, that sufficed for me.
Even if I enjoyed reading this absurdist financial and mafia thriller with a love and philosophical twist a tad more, I cannot say it stirred me particularly, despite the delightful and wise company of the protagonist’s cat Schopenhauer and his (the protagonist’s, not the cat’s) satiric take on nonsensical management blather (or is that a pleonasm?). Henri Koskinen’s struggle to concentrate on his calculations when the insurance company he works for moves to open space premises is pretty recognisable – just like his feeling having turned into a Dinosaur, a misfit in the modern workspace when missing the necessary mindset. I agree that open-plan offices were devised by satan in the deepest caverns of hell and that they are hell on earth for introverts.
I didn’t like them and I didn’t like our open-plan office. It was noisy, full of distractions, interruptions, banalities. But more than anything, it was full of people. I didn’t like the things that so many others seemed to like: spontaneous conversations, the continual asking for and giving of advice, the constant cheap banter.
(It is even worse with misophonia).
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From an optimist perspective, as I haven’t met before a jobless actuary who sees mathematics and logic as the solution to all one’s problems and who overnight turns into an attractive, successful people manager annex hero saving the adventure park he inherited from his brother both from criminals and bankruptcy every day and the cover of this novel (I am not sure which I disliked more, the one of the Dutch or of the English translation) was so hideous the book could only be better, why would I grumble on having been gifted a couple of hours of escapist, almost childish cartoonesque technicolor fun, a mildly amusing feel good experience? This is unpretentious entertainment and a film adaptation is the making. Shouldn’t that be enough, foolish and spoilt book snob that I am?
I could reveal the connection between Tove Jansson’s art and this novel but perhaps I would prefer not to. Ditto for Georgia O’Keeffe, Lee Krasner, Dorothea Tanning, Helen Frankenthaler and Tamara De Lempicka.
There must have been a tenderness between us, intimacy, trust. There must have been a loving union of two bodies. LoyalChronicle of a divorce foretold
There must have been a tenderness between us, intimacy, trust. There must have been a loving union of two bodies. Loyalty and the promise of a shared future. And yet it was over in a flash, and then it was as though our intimacy and trust, this loving union, had never existed at all. For how can we conceive a loving union that doesn’t last? Can there ever have been a true union, if it doesn’t last?
[image] (Benson Kua)
Who wants to read another novel on the breakdown of a marriage? Sometimes I wonder what actually makes me pick up yet another book on this agonising theme. Is it voyeurism, do I read it for similar reasons why people slow down to gawk at road accidents, rubbernecking? Or am I looking for the wry endorsement that most marriages if not already pretty disastrous in themselves simply don’t rhyme with happy endings. Would there be really any consolation in the awareness that happiness cannot be lasting? Is it a hankering for normality, whatever that might be? A confirmation that my parents long and happy marriage is simply the exception that proves the rule- a dream coming true as implausible as winning the lottery?
I guess I was simply lured in reading these promising sentences of A.M. Homes:
A brilliant and breathtaking novel that is for anyone who has ever loved…The Story of a Marriage is the naked truth, sexy and sad, stunning for its clarity, the author’s ability to simultaneously render denial and knowing too much. It is a novel about all the things we know and don’t want to know about ourselves, our partners and our lives and the shocking reminder that the very same things that draw us together are the ones that pull us apart.
Doesn’t that sound like a fabulous novel? Alas, my mistake.
[image] (Paul Sanders)
Sure, since Anna Karenina we all are aware of the witticism that all happy families are alike and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Perhaps because of reading too many (similar) novels I now doubt that: it seems there are not that many variations in family unhappiness at all. Often it turns out a variation on the theme of self-destruction, self-sabotage or smothering the beloved or the happiness by holding on too tightly. Time and again Louis Aragon’s despondent poem comes to mind :
Rien n'est jamais acquis à l'homme : ni sa force, ni sa faiblesse ni son coeur ; et quand il croit ouvrir ses bras, son ombre est celle d'une croix ; et quand il croit serrer son bonheur, il le broie. Sa vie est un étrange et douloureux divorce... Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux.
(Nothing is ever gained by man, neither his force, Nor his weakness, his heart, and whenever he thinks That he opens his arms, his shadow forms a cross, When he grasps happiness, at last, he crushes it, His life is just a strange, long and painful divorce.There is not any happy love.)
In The Story of a marriage the narrator looks back on his marriage attempting to experience and assess the relationship and himself through the eyes of his ex-wife, Timmy. During those twenty years, Jon seems to go out of his way to try ruin his relationship with Timmy.
When his wife Timmy meets another man at work who lives nearby and shares her interest for running and skiing, he encourages her to feel free and follow all her heart’s desires. He almost pushes her in the arms of the other man, in a somewhat baffling mixture of a permanent need to reinforce the image he cherishes of Timmy and him as an open-minded, liberated and unconventional couple and because he is aroused by the fantasies he spins around Timmy having sex with another man to spice up their own lovemaking. He also seems to forcibly mould himself into a reversal of traditional gender roles. Jon is a writer, he is the one staying at home and taking care of the two children and the whole household, while he stimulates Timmy to live a life outside of the family circle – work, friends, lots of outdoor exercising. While they were rather on the same wavelength when they met, these patterns seem to affect their characters: Jon turns into a fragily, overly solicitous, feminine introvert, Timmy takes on the masculine, extrovert role towards the world, ironically enhanced by the male nickname Jon chose to give her at the moment they met. Nevertheless, as a writer, Jon continues to write the script of their relationship while Timmy seems less and less prepared to play the part that has been allotted to her and egged on by growing irritation she changes the terms of the relationship Jon imposed on her.
It is hardly surprising that Jon’s unilateral view on an open relationship in the end doesn’t work out very well, his suffering and misery seem the almost natural outcome of what he has brought on himself. The rather bland writing style didn’t resonate with me much. Jon’s introspection on the relationship sounds rather hollow and even his testimonial of his disintegration and excruciating sorrow left me uncomfortably indifferent. The reversal of roles felt too forced, the outcome of it all too predictable. Even if in page count it is a brief novel, the slow and agonising decline of the relationship into the snowy abyss of foretold divorce seemed to take ages. (** ½)....more
Oh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play. Who couldOh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play. Who could believe the sky at the back wasn’t painted?
Perhaps worse than becoming invisible when aging is to find oneself becoming risible, out of touch, the laughing stock in the merciless, condescending eye of youthful brashness. It is hard to cultivate and maintain an unconditional sense of self-worth when confronted which such cruelty. Who are you in the deepest parts of your fragile being, when nobody is watching?
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Miss Brill, a middle-aged English teacher residing in a seaside town in France, makes a habit of crawling out of her dark little room every Sunday, spending her idle afternoons in the park, observing the people, enjoying the tunes a band is playing, eavesdropping on conversations of the people surrounding her. As the season is changing and it is getting chilly, she cheerfully warms herself by taking out her cherished fur stole and basking in the radiant natural beauty that meets her eye: Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down drooping, and through them just a line of sea, and beyond the blue sky with gold-veined clouds.
Sitting on a bench, observing the people around her from a distance, sitting in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round her, she feels part of the whole, without needing to participate herself – as if attending a play. Nevertheless some sense of belonging engulfs her and she permits herself some mildly cheeky thoughts and judgements on others, filling in their interactions with her own imagination as if she were a playwright - until her carefully self-created illusionary world is shred to pieces. Boxing herself in again like her fur stole, even her innocuous Sunday treat, a slice of honey cake, loses his lustre.
As ever elegantly written and well-composed, replete with well-chosen symbols, motifs, echoes and reflections this is a quietly devastating short story showing Katherine Mansfield in excellent shape. The emotional impact of this intense evocation of loneliness and disillusion on the reader corresponds to Mansfield’s dexterity in drafting mood pieces, making the allusions to her literary indebtedness to Anton Chekhov sound plausible (the puncturing of illusions in particularly bringing Chekhov's equally heart-rending The Kiss to mind).
Lately reading an essay of Salman Rushdie on censorship, expounding to his readers that for many of us liberty and frWaiting for an uncertain dawn
Lately reading an essay of Salman Rushdie on censorship, expounding to his readers that for many of us liberty and freedom of speech come as naturally and unnoticed like the air we breathe, this novel, even if set in the early seventies and published in 1975 comes across as written yesterday. It is a trenchant remonstrance not to take personal, political and artistic freedom for granted, even if one is living in a part of the world that is less inclined than the current Turkish authorities to silence writers, journalists and artists, wielding the law against them as a weapon, prosecuting and jailing them.
Having been imprisoned and exiled for her left wing political views after the military coup in 1971(*), the Turkish novelist Sevgi Soysal (1936-1976 ) enrols in the apparently longstanding troublesome relationship the Turkish authorities at diverse periods in the history of the state maintain with some of its writers and intellecuals (Orhan Pamuk, Aslı Erdoğan, Ahmet AltanI Will Never See the World Again).
[image] Wall painting showing the symbols of Adana on the ceilings of Optiumum Outlet Center in Yüreğir, Adana – Turkey
Get yourself out of this. Now! You must choose your battles carefully, very carefully indeed. As carefully as love. You must be open to all battles, see the beauty in the world and its importance. But you must choose the ones you wish to fight. What use will beautiful sentences do me in here? Beauty knows no shadows. It has no place in here.
Rushdie writes that At night, as we fall asleep, we assume we will be free tomorrow, because we were free today. The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom..This novel gives an illustration of the impact on individual lives when that assumption of waking up as a free person is upended.
The novel takes place during one night when a gathering at a dinner party in a house in the south-Eastern Turkish town of Adana is raided by the police and three of those present are taken to the police headquarters for interrogation: Oya, a journalist who was sent to Adana into exile after being imprisoned for a year in Ankara as a political prisoner (as Sevgi Soysal was herself); Mustafa, a teacher who also spent time in prison because of his left wing political activities and was recently released, and Ali, Mustafa’s uncle, a worker and the host of the dinner. During the long night of interrogation they reflect on their lives and beliefs while they are at the mercy of the police . In a stream of consciousness narrative their thoughts wander over past and present traumatising experiences of detainment, humiliation, torture and violence, over feelings of isolation, reflecting on their own revolutionary élan, wishes of reform and defeatism. Oscillating between their reflections and impressions, Sevgi Soysal reveals their different ideological and psychological struggles, vulnerabilities and doubts, intermingled with the points of view of other family members, fellow prisoners they knew in the past and the thoughts of officials and police officers who impose their own agenda, whether or not they abuse their power to guarantee the social and economic order according to martial law or to secure their own position in the hierarchy.
Soysal’s direct and austere prose skilfully draws the reader into the minds of the characters. Touching on power balances between men and women, the dynamics within the family and marriage, the contrasts between town and countryside, the various and contradicting loyalties of people depending on the multiple groups they belong too, torn between traditional and modern ideas, she is strikingly frank and open on sexuality and the body (one of her books was banned for obscenity), making a powerful feminist point through conveying Oya’s anxiety that her period might start and her interrogator might see the blood stains, realising that if we see our own bodies as shameful, if its untold secrets are mysteries even to us, if we censor our thoughts, lest they be judged evil, how are we ever to stand up for our beliefs?. Her depiction of the violence inflicted on the prisoners and how it is varied according to their origin, sex or class is harrowing. Nonetheless the brutality of these scenes, Sevgi Soysal’s realistic evocation of life in prison is interspersed with moments of humour, light, resilience and courage; her prose breathes an indomitable spirit.
The title of this novel can be read literally as well as metaphorically: once the night is gone and dawn arrives, Sevgi Soysal leaves it open what will become of her three protagonists- in some way their uncertain future conjures up questions on what might become of Turkey in the future, once the darkness of the depicted age will lighten up.
The introduction of the translator sheds a light on Sevgi Soysal’s personal activism and experience in prisons, making the fictional rendering of them in the novel even more poignant. Reminiscent of Oriana Fallaci’s A Man (on the detention and subjection to torture of Alexandros Panagoulis, the Greek politican and poet who fought against the Regime of the Colonels (1967-1974)), this book is a powerful testimony that legality isn’t synonymous to legitimacy with regard to human rights.
Oh, the mistakes you can make, when longing for a friendly face grows too strong.
Thanks to Archipelago and NetGalley for giving me the chance to read an ARC of this novel.
(*) In March 1970, senior army officers, concerned by the uncontrolled spread of political violence and a revolt in Kurdish regions of eastern Turkey and fearing that political divisions would spread to the army itself, delivered a warning to the government and a year later forced prime minister Demirel’s resignation. During the next two years, Turkey was ruled by supraparty coalitions of conservative politicians and technocrats who governed with the support of the army and who were primarily concerned with restoring law and order. Martial law was established in several provinces and was not completely lifted until September 1973; there were armed clashes with guerrillas and many arrests and trials; extremist political parties, including the WPT and the Islamic-based National Order Party (NOP), were shut down; and the constitution was amended to limit personal freedoms. Unlike in 1960–61, however, there was no sweeping political reorganization; the constitution, parliament, and major political parties remained. In 1973 the army withdrew to the barracks when its candidate for the presidency was defeated, leaving government once more to the politicians (from www.britannica.com)....more
Luminous, iridescent, glowing joy. A joyous multitude of shades of green and blue. Art as jubilant as Händel’s music. Is it possible that paint[image]
Luminous, iridescent, glowing joy. A joyous multitude of shades of green and blue. Art as jubilant as Händel’s music. Is it possible that paintings make you want to sing and dance?
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Last year I was thrilled hearing the news that a double exhibition comprising both a broad overview of David Hockney’s work and the I-pad ‘paintings’ Hockney made in Normandy during the first pandemic lockdown in 2020 would come to BOZAR in Brussels from 8 October 2021 until 23 Januany 2022. Hockney’s art had only shortly before caught my attention, when I was reading three episodes of Ali Smith’s seasonal cycle with his colourful arboreal tunnel paintings and the catalogue of the Hockney–Van Gogh exhibition held in Amsterdam in 2019, Hockney/Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature: The Joy of Nature. The possibility of seeing some of his work in the real was quite exciting.
The exhibitions blew me away (and were also a nice occasion to bring into practise what Ben Street taught me in his How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone : the enlargements of the I-pad prints put me in motion, circling around searching for the optimal distance to look at them). I was so enthralled I went to see the exhibitions three times, each time finding the art works as fresh as the first time and discovering aspects that hadn’t occurred to me the previous time. Forgetting time and space, I didn’t noticed the presence of one of my nephews who was visiting the exhibitions with his girlfriend. Later, gathering with the family at the Christmas table, he revealed he had been there too, poking fun at me for being so transported. Even my daughter, who accompanied me the third time (coaxed by the promise of eating ramen for lunch) and isn’t so keen on staring at paintings was enchanted, disagreeing quite firmly with her teacher of aesthetics who had dismissed Hockney’s work in class as banal and artificial.
Some of the art criticism of the spring works was rather harsh (the prints aren’t true paintings, the style of them is simple and uniform, ugly and unpersuasive, the multitude of them repetitive, the vibrant colour palette synthetic, the register false and fudged). It might just be my (decadent?) proclivity to enjoy art more than nature, but just looking at these pictures made me more happy than actual spring ever did – where I live spring is mostly a mixture of wetness and cold greyness- a period of fruitless yearning for a few (at best watery) beams of sun.
Perhaps because of my gushing about the exhibitions, I was gifted this lovely book which accompanied the exhibition as a birthday present. It includes three short pieces preceding the pictures: a brief, lovely introduction by the organizers of the exhibitions (The London Royal Academy of Arts and Bozar in Brussels), Edith Devaney interviewing David Hockney on what inspired him to create his spring works and his use of the I-pad as a medium to create them and a few pages by the novelist Willam Boyd in praise of David Hockney (a piece somewhat veering into an sweeping mode, stating that the comparison of Hockney’s genius to Mozart’s (a similar kind of effortless, unchallenged mastery of many forms characterising them) goes not quite far enough, ascribing Hockney a ‘shapeshifting liberation that Mozart could never even have dreamed of).
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It are however not these words but the 116 pictures documenting and celebrating the unfolding of spring – grass, ponds, blossoming trees - that are the essence of this book. They are a wonderful memory of the exhibition that will make me return to it time and again.
Following on his spring paintings in Normandy, David Hockney continued creating new work with his I-pad, resulting in a new exhibition to open in galleries in London, Paris, and the US, 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, concentrating this time on flower vases he could draw inside and containing this playful autoportrait as a centrepiece.
I did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from honeymoon, wI did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests.
Bang! What an explosive entry. From the first deliciously long, savoury, suspenseful sentence Javier Marías had me hooked, holding me dangling on his words like a fish that lost sense of its fish nature, oblivious if it is water or air that is essential for life – or both. Even if I thought having an inkling of what to expect with this second foray into his writing after reading Thus Bad Begins a few years ago, Marías brilliant writing took my breath away.
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Opening with the suicide of the sister of the narrator’s mother – a sister who as well had been married to the narrator father, Ranz, previously - Marías weaves an intriguing tapestry out of family secrets and mysteries, circling around the shady past of Juan’s enigmatic father Ranz and his two – or three? – marriages. At least one of these women being dead, allusions on Bluebeard slowly sneak under the skin. Why does Ranz give Juan the nuptial advice not to share all his secrets with his bride? What is he hiding? Juan’s bewilderment on his family’s past interferes with his feelings of mystification by his own recent marriage with Luisa, his ominous sense of foreboding that disaster looms over them, cunningly drawing the reader in by weaving variations on the book’s epigraph from Macbeth as a leitmotif throughout the novel:
My hands are of your colour; but I Shame To wear A Heart So White
Isn’t one of the pleasures of marriage that one is able to share and talk about ‘everything’ safely and at ease, finding a non-judging listening ear in the intimacy of pillow talk? Why would one keep things to oneself? Once something has been told, it cannot be untold. The listener’s heart might no longer be white, but tainted by knowledge that is unbearable.
The truth never shines forth, as the saying goes, because the only truth is that which is known to no one and which remains untransmitted, that which is not translated into words or images, that which remains concealed and unverified, which is perhaps why we do recount so much or even everything, to make sure that nothing has ever really happened, not once it's been told...
At first, because of the multiple scenes of eavesdropping and voyeurism (an important leitmotif in Marías Thus Bad Begins as well) and the complex and intriguing relationship of Juan with his father Ranz, I was reminded of Alberto Moravia’s The Voyeur. While Moravia’s novel however has heavy Freudian undertones, Marías doesn’t seem interested in such straightforward psychologising. By the figure of the mysterious father he rather evokes the elusiveness and intangibility of life– a point he returns to several times in the novel: We spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus can be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do.
Apart from the flowing sentences meandering the reader through the narrative in a slightly intoxicating pace, what makes this book so delicious are its many echoes, inner resonances of themes, reflections and motifs which are mirrored in Marías’ ample use of repetitions giving the novel the quality of a musical composition. From Juan’s fairly innocent duplicity in his work as a translator to Ranz’ dubious exploits as an art expert, Marías questions the sheer possibility of truth and truthfulness, making the point that one simply cannot know the truth. His irreverent, playful tone seems to suggest best to take the futility of truth and life lightly, but cannot conceal a subtle undertone of melancholy.
The novel is replete with amusing interludes and absurdist, almost slapstick scenes, showing Marías as a lover of the art of stylish digression. From an essay of Jonathan Coe on the book, I gathered that Don Quixote, rather than Tristram Shandy must have been on Marías’ mind as a type of digression (having read neither Don Quixote nor Tristram Shandy, Coe’s observations are a powerful reminder to try to squeeze them in before everything ends, which can happen any moment, Marías’ recent sudden demise a sad memento mori).
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Marriage and secrets, perhaps they are as inseparable as Siamese twins, the one unable to exist without the other?
Does something become true if we repeat it often enough? Revealing more would just spoil the reading pleasure of discovering the many delight this novel has in store for yourself, unnecessarily risking a stain on your reader’s heart still white....more
Recitatif is a suggestive, powerful and deceivingly simple short story that offers the reader a richly filled dish with food for thought. Toni MorrisoRecitatif is a suggestive, powerful and deceivingly simple short story that offers the reader a richly filled dish with food for thought. Toni Morrison hands over some sharp ammunition to question one’s own assumptions and innate biases which seem hard to avoid in the struggle to make sense of the world and comprehend one’s place in society. We seem to need clues, social codes and categories to navigate in the world. The social need to feel part of a whole or a group to know who we are, not to lose ourselves in the amorphousness of the masses collective is a strong one – the flipside of such need to belong however that clinging to collective identity creates a dynamic of insiders versus outsiders and can capsize into cognitive distortion, leading to a generalisation and categorisation and ultimately labelling of people, making one overlook what binds and connects rather than divides, possibly opening a road to cruelty.
Twyla and Roberta encounter each other as roommates in a children’s home at the age of eight. Unlike the other children, they are not orphans but end up in t-Bonny’s for four months because their mothers cannot adequately take care of them: one girl’s mother dances all night, the other girl’s mother is sick. One of them is black. One of them is white. Does it matter? One of them will thrive and live in luxury, one of them will struggle to make ends meet. Later in life they coincidentally will bump into each other again a couple of times, unable to bridge the widening gap between them as the differences between them become as visible as the different colour of their skin. Yet their bond from the past yields common ground, rooted in their shared experience of being disposed of as children and being haunted by a faltering memory of how and why they (mis)treated Maggie, mute and mocked by everyone – and what they both attempt to forget.
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Toni Morrison masterfully conveys how black and white, dichotomous thinking comes in many different shapes and forms, whether related to the colour of the skin, social class or physical (dis)ability. The experiences of Twyla and Roberta show how differences and similarities can both divide as well as unite because social life consists in a dynamic and complex interplay implying the unending and unpredictable shift of power, collective identities and changing affinities, change the only constant we know....more
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