A philosophical and existentialist book disguised as a kind of noir thriller. Its main themes are animal rights and the lives of 'marginal' people jusA philosophical and existentialist book disguised as a kind of noir thriller. Its main themes are animal rights and the lives of 'marginal' people just surviving . (The 2018 Nobel prize-winning author is a vegetarian.)
The main character is a woman, a retired engineer and teacher now living in a rural area of Poland near the Czechoslovakian border. Rich people from the cities have summer homes here and her main source of income, other than a puny pension, is caring for these summer homes in the off-season. The few neighbors she has are all kind of cast-off folks (like herself) and she gives them names like Oddball and Big Foot. A former student of hers, ‘Dizzy,’ visits occasionally.
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She’s a bundle of nerves and anxieties, aches and pains that she tries to cure with herbs. She often uses the phrase ‘at my age,’ yet she climbs ladders to make repairs to houses. Her hobby is astrology, especially predicting people’s deaths from their dates of birth.
She and her former student love the poetry of William Blake and make many references to it - that's where the title comes from.
Like the author, the main character is a vegetarian and she does not endear herself to her neighbors, some of whom hunt and poach off-season. She reports them to the police, who do nothing. Someone shot her darling dogs, ‘my dears.’
When the bodies of neighbors and hunters start turning up in the woods, she goes to the police with her astrological theories and her opinion that they were killed by animals for revenge. Of course she is immediately branded as a ‘nut.’
I particularly enjoyed her writing as illustrated by the quotes below. Rather than giving away any plot, I’ll let the author speak:
“With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts.”
“ ‘Its Animals show the truth about a country,’ I said. ‘Its attitude toward Animals. If people behave brutally toward Animals, no form of democracy is ever going to help them, in fact nothing will at all.’ ”
“The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud over the toilet bowl, and then flush them away.”
“Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges.”
“There are various magazines and newspapers that I sometimes buy, but reading them usually gives me an unspecified sense of guilt. A feeling that there's something I haven't done, something I've forgotten, that I'm not up to the demands of the task, that in some essential way I'm lagging behind the rest.... But when one takes a careful look at the people passing in the street, one might assume that many others have the same problem too, and haven't done what they should with their lives either.”
“So far we've never provided the world with anything useful. We haven't come up with the idea for any invention. We have no power, we have no resources apart from our small properties. We do our jobs, but they are of no significance for anyone else. If we went missing, nothing would really change. Nobody would notice.”
“A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.”
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This book is the author’s best-known work with almost 100,000 ratings on GR, a huge number for a translated author. The Polish author, Olga Tokarczuk, was the 2018 Nobel prize winner. I have also read her second best-seller, Flights, which won the Man Booker International prize also in 2018.
Top photo of a vacation home rental in Poland from holidu.com The author from seattletimes.com...more
Franz Kafka would be pleased to read The Devastation of Silence, the latest novel by João Reis. We have a Portuguese army captain imprisoned in a GermFranz Kafka would be pleased to read The Devastation of Silence, the latest novel by João Reis. We have a Portuguese army captain imprisoned in a German POW camp during WW I. He would be moved to a better camp for officers if he had his papers, but of course he has no papers that would allow him to get his papers.
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Where is he existentially? I guess we could say he’s into ‘presentism.’ He’s given up searching for meaning in his life. We join the narrator in a conversation with an old friend years after the war as the captain recounts his experiences. His friend is the type who arrived hours early for the train, just in case. The captain thinks: “He was able to make plans well in advance, quite the opposite of myself, who, ever since being incarcerated, am only able to conceive of the present, I fell out of the habit of making plans, a habit which, when you really look at it, is truly disgusting: we make plans and yet we die without getting back the time we lost planning how to fill the time we didn't live…”
The story is set during WWI when there was still some gentlemanly-ness among the Germans in the prisoner of war camp that our narrator finds himself in. The commandant, knowing that our narrator was a captain, and that he speaks some German, invites him to play backgammon. Likewise the German prison doctor befriends him and confides in him about his dreadful marital problems.
Otherwise the conditions are horrid – lice, bedbugs, pneumonia and tuberculosis are rampant and many prisoners die. The prisoners are in a state of semi-starvation and most of the time they think about, dream about, and talk about food. The Germans respond to any disturbance or altercation with beatings and bayonets. On occasion they kill a prisoner for causing a disruption.
The only task of the prisoners seems to be that of digging graves for their comrades who died. In addition to the Portuguese prisoners, there are French, Russians and British. Our narrator writes letters home for his unlettered comrades, assuming he can get hold of paper.
The narrator’s approach to life is silence. Here are a few quotes from his thoughts that will also show us the author’s writing style:
“…speaking is a lamentable act and pointless, I find social interactions deeply taxing, especially with meddlesome acquaintances like my friend, with whom, if I'm being honest, I don't speak, or at least not often - my greatest fault is that I’m a good listener, others speak and I listen, they open their mouths and a steady stream of babble washes over me, I’m a receptacle, attentive, a victim, they talk talk talk and only require my ears…”
“…he was always asking me questions and more questions... I suppose I'm not too bothered by questions, the problem is that they need to be responded to, in fact, if questions didn't have to be answered, I doubt they would irritate me at all…”
“…I turned my back and abstained from speaking because it is my belief that silence is invariably the best option, I have found that there is no better response to any and all problems than not speaking.”
“Those stories, hours of wasted conversation! In vain! And for what? I considered speaking to the fact, but I refrained. The less we let on to those around us, the better. A closed mouth!” “In fact, I was unsure whether or not to respond; out of habit, I opt for the latter, as I’d already confessed to my friend and his teacups multiple times, in the long run it is the choice that yields the fewest problems, it is better to maintain ambiguity, uncertainty, it is a technique I've used throughout my life to enormous success, without it perhaps I would have never been made captain…”
All that being said about silence, the narrator has broken his rule by giving his friend his life story in several hours of conversation at the train station restaurant. It’s as if all those decades of pent-up conversation finally found an outlet to erupt through.
We are treated to a great story and excellent writing. Like his countryman, Jose Saramago, Reis writes in run-on paragraphs punctuated mainly by commas.
The author, João Reis (b. 1985), is a Portuguese writer and literary translator of Scandinavian languages. He studied veterinary science and philosophy and has lived in Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and the UK.
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João Reis is proving himself to be a versatile writer. João has published five books in Portuguese and this is his third novel to be translated into English. I previously read and reviewed his excellent short novel The Translator's Bride and his hilarious Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow. The latter is highly rated on GR (4.2) and was shortlisted for the Fernando Namora Literary Prize and longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. His latest book, The Devastation of Silence, was longlisted for the Prémio Oceanos award in 2019.
Disclaimer: João is a good friend on GR and he sent me this book as a gift. We have previously discussed my book about Portuguese Americans in New England.
Top photo of Portuguese soldiers in WW I from en.topwar.ru The author from writersfest.bc.ca ...more
This short (100 pages) simple book is about the absurdity and violence of war. It's bleak, and I guess we could call it existentialist[Revised 7/4/23]
This short (100 pages) simple book is about the absurdity and violence of war. It's bleak, and I guess we could call it existentialist.
The story is set in the German-occupied Netherlands during World War II. A Dutch partisan, fighting the Germans, comes across an abandoned mansion in a resort town while lost from his group.
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After years of primitive living conditions he has clean linens, the chance to take a shower, canned food and a stocked wine cellar. There's a locked room he can't gain entrance to.
Then the Germans arrive and take over the house for officer quarters. The partisan is in deathly fear of being discovered for who he is. Now he pretends to be the house owner. He plays the part well, audacious enough to argue with the head German officer about rules for his men while they are in the house.
One day while all the Germans are out, the real owners, man and wife return. What is he to do now? And who or what is in that locked room?
Toward the end of the novel, we learn the book is not just about the absurdity of war, but also about the dehumanizing violence that war leads to.
I thought the writing, like the book, was straightforward and simple. Nothing literary. This is probably better thought of as a short story.
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The Dutch author (1921-1995) wrote more than 20 novels and collections of short stories but he had to support himself as a geography professor. (So did I, lol.) Very few have been translated into English and those that have been show few reviews or ratings on GR, so he is relatively unknown in the English world.
Top photo: The city of Rotterdam after the German bombing during the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. From Wikipedia.
Sketch of the author by Ruth Gwily from nybooks.com...more
This is my first of Simeon’s ‘roman durs.’ The prolific writer wrote 117 of them. The phrase means ‘hard’ novels or ‘harrowing’ novels and generally tThis is my first of Simeon’s ‘roman durs.’ The prolific writer wrote 117 of them. The phrase means ‘hard’ novels or ‘harrowing’ novels and generally the phrase specifically applies to Simenon, otherwise known for his 75 Inspector Maigret novels. This novel, Dirty Snow, is a tale of pointless evil.
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When we read praise of Simenon’s writing, it is not in reference to his tame Maigret novels. For example John Banville wrote of his Simenon’s “extraordinary masterpieces of the twentieth century.” William Faulkner said “I love reading Simenon. He makes me think of Chekhov.” And [maybe a bit much] a reviewer in The Independent wrote “Simenon ought to be spoken of in the same breath as Camus, Beckett and Kafka.”
The story is set during the German occupation of Paris and it's focused on a young man, probably 20-ish, who grows up in a brothel. He never knew his father and his mother is the Madame. As the Madame’s son he has his choice of any woman but that’s an occasional thing and he seems generally uninterested in them. He has plenty of money that he gets from his mother because she’s afraid of him. The women in the brothel wait on him as maids, cooking for him and bringing him coffee. Mostly he hangs out in bars, occasionally picking up a woman to join his mother’s crew.
We’re immediately plunged into a dark world where men brag about how many people they've killed and why, One of them tells how he strangled a prostitute because she was pregnant.
The young man decides it's time he killed somebody. (view spoiler)[ He stabs and kills a German officer who visits the brothel and steals his gun. (hide spoiler)] One of the tenants in the building, an older widowed man with a teen-aged daughter sees what he did. The young man becomes obsessed with interacting with this older man – his missing father figure?
The main character and a bar acquaintance plot a way to make money. (view spoiler)[ He learns there is another high-placed German officer who is obsessed with his collection of watches. The young man recalls a friendly older couple he knew as a kid who had a collection of antique watches. This turns into another cold-blooded murder. (hide spoiler)]
He does another truly bizarre, hideous thing to get the attention of the older tenant. (view spoiler)[ The older man’s daughter is in love with the main character and our evil man arranges for her ‘rape by proxy.’ (hide spoiler)]
Now we get into what I'll call Raskolnikov mode. He never brags about the crimes he committed but flashes the gun around and shows off his wad of money despite warnings from his friends in the bars about how unwise that is. It's almost like he wants to be caught and punished for his evil deeds.
Sure enough, he is arrested. He (and the reader) never know which of his crimes he was arrested for – maybe all of them. The last third of the book is the cat-and-mouse game he plays with his interrogators, offering bits of information piece by piece. He wants to be beaten and executed.
An Afterword to the novel tells us that its theme is pointlessness. He had a pointless life. He did pointless things. Perhaps the only non-pointless thing happens at the end. (view spoiler)[ His execution (hide spoiler)] He has no idea why he is on this earth and does not even seem to know what he wants. Indeed dark.
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Incredibly, Georges Simenon (1903-1989), a Belgian novelist writing in French, wrote more than 500 novels.
Top photo a movie still from a version of The Third Man from refractionsfilm.files.wordpress.com The author from newyorker.com...more
[Edited for typos 3/12/23] An existential classic from Japan. A lonely young man is an amateur entomologist and schoolteacher. He hopes to find a new s[Edited for typos 3/12/23] An existential classic from Japan. A lonely young man is an amateur entomologist and schoolteacher. He hopes to find a new species of sand beetle, so he goes off on a weekend expedition to a beach town where the houses are buried in pits by the ever-shifting stands. He asks about a place to stay and reaches his night’s lodging with a landlady by descending a rope ladder.
The next day the rope ladder is gone. He discovers he is a prisoner who will be kept there to help the woman, a young widow, with her work. Her work is the daily and endless task of shoveling out buckets of sand that accumulate each night. The sand buckets are pulled up each morning by teams of village men. Food and water come down by rope from the same men. If he stops working, the men hold off food and water.
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It’s considered a modern existential novel, published in Japanese in 1962 and translated into English in 1964. Kafka’s Metamorphosis comes to mind – will he turn into a sand beetle? The woman who lives there seems to have accepted her fate.
Will he try to escape? If so, how? Will his escape be successful?
What kind of relationship will develop between the man and the woman living in such close quarters?
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The author provides many touches of realism with nightmarish details of the sand invading their bodies, their clothes, their food, their water. The roof and walls of the primitive house can’t keep it out.
We also get entomological and geological information. Sand isn’t just a collection of tiny objects that flow and shift: sand involves the flowing and shifting that creates it: form and function; structure and process.
A good story; amazingly, never boring and in some ways a suspense novel. I read it first many years ago and didn't hesitate to read it again. I added it to my favorites.
It occurs to me the book is mistitled because we learn nothing of the inner workings of the mind of the woman. We only see her actions and hear limited conversation from her. An omniscient narrator tells us of the man’s mental anguish and of his philosophical thinking. The book could just as well be titles The Man in the Dunes.
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The author (1924 -1993) was a prolific writer with a dozen novels, almost all translated into English. He wrote a dozen collections of short stories and a dozen plays. Women in the Dunes is by far his most popular work on GR and it was made into a Japanese film in 1964. I have also read his novel Beasts Head for Home and a collection of fantasy/magical realism short stories titled Beyond the Curve. I rated Dunes 5; Curve 4 and Beasts 3.
Top photo, a still from the movie from co.pinterest.com Tottori sand dunes in Japan from japanrailpass.com The author from azquotes.com...more
“On the Road” in North Africa, published eight years before Kerouac’s classic. A 30-ish American married couple and a male friend are traveling in the“On the Road” in North Africa, published eight years before Kerouac’s classic. A 30-ish American married couple and a male friend are traveling in the French colonies right after the end of World War II. This was at a time when the US State Department advised people NOT to travel there because of rampant disease and the disintegration of social conditions and of law and order.
The first half of the book focuses on the husband; the second half on the wife. (view spoiler)[ He dies of typhoid in a hut in a God-forsaken village with no doctor or hospital and she walks away into the night. The authorities assume she left him to die. (hide spoiler)] He is so obsessed with immersing himself in the travel experience that one night he slides down a hillside used as the local dump and sits there taking in the sights and smells of the garbage and filth.
Generally he’s an Ugly American par excellence. His wife knows that he wanders off at night to go to prostitutes. He drunkenly demands tea, flashing his money, after his Arab host has told him the women are asleep.
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Somehow his wife loves him. She puts up with all his nonsense while she fends off advances from their traveling companion who is in love with her. She thinks of the friend as a jerk and a bore…but... Later in the book she travels alone, literally in the desert. (view spoiler)[ She is picked up by a camel caravan, assaulted by the men and forced to marry one of them. Then she is kept in a harem until she escapes. (hide spoiler)]
There’s a lot of local color from what was then a far edge of the earth. They are not staying at Club Med or even a Motel 6 in an abandoned strip mall. These American travelers apparently don’t mind mosquitos, lice, bed bugs, and eating next to trash cans. Perhaps they are trying to repair or reinvigorate their more-than-ten-year marriage. We are told it’s a novel of alienation and existential despair. I’ll vouch for that.
It’s a good story and quite fascinating. I wish we had more psychological background about how these folks ended up this way. What drove them to this almost masochist desire for such a down-to-earth travel experience? We assume the lead character is wealthy because he has the time and the money to travel. The title apparently comes from Gnosticism where the stars are holes in a solid sky – and you don’t want to know what is on the other side.
I read this book because I noticed that so many friends on GR had rated it highly and had given it good reviews. The book is considered by many a modern classic. It is on a couple of top-100 lists of contemporary novels.
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The author (1910-1999) was a fascinating character. He was born in New York and attended the University of Virginia but basically spent the rest of his life as an ex-pat. He was a composer as well as a novelist. At first he lived in Paris, where he was part of Gertrude Stein’s crowd. Even though he was a gay man (he had a long affair with the composer Aaron Copland), he was married to a woman (who was a lesbian). But their relationship was more than a marriage of convenience or for show. They genuinely cared for each other all their lives.
Bowles and his wife set up their own literary salon in Tangier in Morocco where guests included folks like Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal.
Top photo from depositphotos.com Photo of the author from quotesgram.com
There are a lot of excellent reviews, so I’ll make this one fairly short. [revised 6/12/22]
A man believed to be Stiller, a missing sculptor, is in a SThere are a lot of excellent reviews, so I’ll make this one fairly short. [revised 6/12/22]
A man believed to be Stiller, a missing sculptor, is in a Swiss prison for vague reasons unknown to the reader at first. He has returned to Switzerland after an absence of nine years. He says he’s an American and has a passport to prove it. But his wife, brother and mistress all call him Stiller to his face. The police say the passport is fake. Yet he insists he’s not Stiller.
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The book is structured as seven notebooks Stiller wrote in prison and a summary report from the public prosecutor. (The latter happens to be a friend of Stiller and the husband of one of his mistresses – I guess this happens in small countries!)
SPOILERS FOLLOW
The notebooks also contain elaborate descriptions and stories from Mexico; cowboys discovering and exploring a cave; Rip Van Winkle; Zurich, California docks, and a nature trip. These are reminiscences of his trips during his years away although it’s not clear to me how they tie into the main story. He even claims to have murdered people. And, as Stiller himself asks, what’s the point of telling all these stories? “It doesn’t mean you’ve been there.”
So it’s a book about identity and self-acceptance. “Know thyself” is only good for starters. Suppose you get to know yourself and you don’t like what you find? After all, Stiller is a kind of crazy alcoholic artist who had been striving for top awards and first-rate art shows but not making it.
He feels he was a coward in the Spanish Civil War because he couldn’t do his duty, even though that would have meant shooting unarmed men he was supposed to be guarding when they escaped.
When he leaves Switzerland, thinking he is running off with his latest lover, he abandons his wife in a TB sanitarium.
In the report from the prosecutor at the end of the book, we get a summary of some of Stiller’s ideas: People ruin their lives by making excessive demands on themselves. Consciousness has evolved more than emotions; hence a discrepancy between intellect and feelings. You can lose contact with your personality. A sarcastic attitude toward emotion is a symptom of this. You can’t love your neighbor until you love yourself; that self-acceptance is the hardest. Self-acceptance does not automatically come with age.
After self-acceptance, can this would-be great artist truly find fulfillment selling ceramic pots to American tourists?
By the way, Swiss prison is a country club by American standards. Stiller’s meals are served by his jailer who also cleans his cell. He gets to go out lunch with his wife or friends once a week. Despite this good treatment (or maybe because of it?) Stiller never misses an opportunity to run down the Swiss for their smugness and good fortune … "so clean one can hardly breathe for hygiene." For whatever reason, Stiller reflects the author’s attitude toward his native country as you can read on the entries on Frisch on the web - he wouldn’t even live there.
Some passages I liked:
“That was quite right, just as everything my counsel says is right in a way that never convinces me and yet always puts me in the wrong.”
“At that time Julika had a dog, a fox terrier, of the sort that goes with childless couples.”
“Nobody likes visiting a married couple in a state of crisis, it’s in the air, even if you know nothing about it, and the visitor has the feeling of being present at an armistice, he feels himself somehow misused, employed for a purpose; conversation becomes dangerous…”
A work of great literary value and a pretty good story, if a little slow in places.
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Top photo of a jail cell in Bern, Switzerland from horizonte-magazin.ch The author, Max Frisch (1911-1991), from neustadtprize.org ...more
Although translated from Japanese, this work pays homage to Western culture in its title and in its constant refere**spoiler alert** [Revised 3/20/23]
Although translated from Japanese, this work pays homage to Western culture in its title and in its constant references to Greek mythology. Much of the plot is Oedipus. We also hear a lot about western music such as the Beatles, classic Hollywood films like Casablanca, and symbols of western consumerism such as Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker.
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A motherless teenage boy kills his despotic father and runs away. Well, maybe he did kill him, maybe he didn’t. (view spoiler)[ It looks more like a 'stand-in' for the boy – a mentally challenged older man who talks to animals - perhaps killed his father. (hide spoiler)]
The boy hides out in a library and at a remote rural cottage. The runaway boy acquires a new best friend who is transgendered. Meanwhile the boy may or may not have had sex with not only his mother, but his long-lost sister as well.
The plot is propelled by magical realism. It rains fish, for example, so it’s hard to tell what is real and what is mythical.
Prophecy, fate, predestination and reincarnation are the themes in this book that the New Yorker characterized as “an insistently metaphysical mind-bender.” A bit slow at times, but it kept my interest.
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With almost half-a-million ratings on GR, Kafka is Murakami’s second most popular book by ratings and reviews on GR. First is Norwegian Wood, then Kafka, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84. The first three of these are all highly rated on GR - above 4.0.
Top photo from nbcnews.com The author from japan-forward.com...more
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