Read East 2011 | The Captive Reader

Archive for the ‘Read East 2011’ Category

Challenges 2011 – Final Recaps

Posted in Read East 2011, Victorian Literature 2011 on December 26, 2011| 2 Comments »

credit: Horia Varlan (flickr)

Retrospective posts seem to be going up on blogs everywhere as 2011 draws to a close. I have been loving the many 2011 favourites lists, which making for some excellent and very tempting reading. My list is a few days off, both because I’m finishing off a book that might very well make it on and because I find it excruciatingly difficult to pass judgement on the many wonderful books I’ve read. I’ll draft a list one day and then come back the next and wonder what I was thinking; how could I have though ——– was worthy of the list? How could I have excluded ———? List making is serious business, a delicate art rather than science, and I have some difficult choices ahead of me.

Less challenging, thankfully, is recapping the challenges I participated in this year (excluding the Canadian Book Challenge 4, which wrapped up at the end of June): the Victorian Literature Challenge and the Eastern European Reading Challenge.

My goal for the Victorian Literature Challenge was to read between 5 and 9 books. I had an enormous amount of fun coming up with a book list for this challenge and then promptly ignored all Victorian lit for several months. As usual when I spend hours making a reading list for a challenge, I ended up reading almost nothing from it. It took me until April to get started on the challenge, with a wonderful reread of Wives and Daughters, one of my all-time favourite books. I then read Agnes Grey and, in Anne, finally found a Brontë sister whose work I can enjoy. I tried Mrs Oliphant for the first time, reading her novellas The Rector and The Doctor’s Family, and was not particularly won over (though listening to the BBC radio dramatization of Miss Marjoribanks this autumn has made me wonder if I shouldn’t give Oliphant another chance). And, most wonderfully of all, I finally discovered Trollope. I enjoyed The Warden but fell completely in love with The American Senator. Reading Trollope has truly been one of the delights of 2011 and, having now amassed a considerable collection of his novels, I plan to continue my enjoyment in 2012 (and, most likely, every year after, reading and then rereading).

Here is the list of what I read for this challenge, with snippets from each review:

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell (highly recommended)
“Gaskell’s straightforwardness has always appealed to me. Artifice and obfuscation are the talents of her minor characters, never her heroes or heroines, admirable for their plain speaking and clarity of purpose. Never is this contrast clearer than between Molly and her stepsister Cynthia. Cynthia bursts into the novel and into Molly’s life in a whirl of colour and energy. She is beautiful and captivating, spirited and somewhat mysterious. She can be all things to all people, knowing how to act best to please each member of her audience. And though the contrast between her and the honest, direct Molly is great, they quickly become close confidents, true sisters…”

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
“This is not an affectionate portrayal of the life of a governess. It stresses the isolation Agnes feels in the households where she is employed, how powerless she is in dealing with both the children and the adults but, generally, it is by no means a dreary book. If anything, it attempts to cover too many things in too few pages, turning this into a book crammed with wit, romance, a shocking amount of moralizing (usually expressed with some painfully affected writing), and some rather heavy themes (isolation and oppression being the two main ones). It is an interesting but confusing mix.”

The American Senator by Anthony Trollope (highly recommended)
“After reading The American Senator by Anthony Trollope, I am now certain that Trollope will become one of my favourite authors. I had suspected as much before but, now that I have finally read him, I know. So chatty, so funny, so detailed, so entertaining – this book was everything that a book should be!”

The Rector and The Doctor’s Family by Margaret Oliphant
“I found Oliphant’s writing style unmemorable and uneven, with some quite clever passages followed by pages and pages of dull plodding stuff, and her tendency to moralize reminiscent of all those lesser Victorian novelists who rely on sentiment rather than skill.”

The Warden by Anthony Trollope
“What I particularly loved about The Warden were Trollope’s descriptive passages. Most of these were mere tangents to the main plot, with Trollope poking fun at newspaper men, politicians, clergymen, lovers, spouses…really anyone and everyone who could possibly be woven into the story however remotely, but they had me giggling away throughout the book. It is these passages that allow the observant, witty narrator to establish himself as the most entertaining character of all.”

And then there was the Eastern European Reading Challenge. My aim was to read 12 books either by authors from or set in Eastern Europe. Considering the generous definition of ‘Eastern’ (here, “Eastern Bloc” countries are all considered Eastern, regardless of their actual geographic orientation), I thought this would be a breeze. It really just seemed like a challenge tailor made to encourage me to read more Czech literature, history, and biographies, maybe with a dash over to Russia or Hungary for a bit of variety. Again, there was a delightful book list made to start things off and, again, I ended up reading very little from it (3 titles, somewhat better than the 1 I managed from the Victorian lit list). I started off well but then read nothing for the challenge between June and November. Whoops. Readers may have noticed a flood of reviews over the last few weeks of Eastern European titles in my desperate attempt to catch up and meet my targeted 12. But with only a few days left in 2011 and mountains of other, non-Eastern European books that I’m eager to read, I am officially admitting defeat and calling it quits at 11 books. Though it was hectic towards the end, I had an amazing time with this challenge. I ventured well outside of my comfort zone and found some absolute delights on my journey (The Snows of Yesteryear, The Gardener’s Year, Skylark, and Prague Tales stand out – several of which are currently in competition for spots on my Best of 2011 list). This challenge did absolutely what a challenge is meant to do: it expanded my horizons as a reader, enriching my life by introducing me to the unfamiliar.

Here are the 11 (sadly, not 12) books I read:

A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena Gorokhova
“…a good but certainly not great memoir of Gorkhova’s life growing up in St. Petersburg during the 1960s and 1970s. Gorokhova is charming and at times quite engaging; overall, it was a pleasant but not particularly special or memorable reading experience.”

The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor von Rezzori (highly recommended)
“Strictly speaking, yes, this is a memoir but really it is von Rezzori telling the life stories of those who surrounded him in his childhood and adolescence. He is their biographer but also our subject. Through portraits of five others – his nurse, his mother, his father, his sister, and his governess – von Rezzori tells the story of his family and his early life, a strangely rootless existence begun in Czernowitz (in Austria-Hungary) in 1914. His homeland eventually became part of Romania and von Rezzori seems to have accepted and love his new country though he was ethnically anything but Romanian.”

The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff
“… a thoughtful, intimate book, absolutely worthy of all the praise that has been heaped upon it since it was first published in 1987.”

Far to Go by Alison Pick
“This really should be a book that I have strong feelings about – it was, after all, a book I was quite excited to read, so much so that I requested a copy from the publisher; when have I ever been able to refuse a book about Czechoslovakia, never mind one set in the exciting years of 1938 and 1939 and written by a Canadian? And yet even as I was reading it, I felt strangely disconnected from it. It was neither glaringly bad nor especially good.”

The Gardener’s Year by Karel Čapek (highly recommended)
“Even new as I am to the obsession, my own recent gardening plights, the missteps and mistakes that were weighing heavily on my soul, were perfectly echoed by Čapek, as though he had been in the garden witnessing my incompetence only a few days previously…”

The Legends of Prague by František Langer
“While these stories are definitely friendlier and less bloodthirsty than the ones I adored as a child, they are still captivating and delightful. And they do what any book about Prague should do: bring the magic of that city to life, allowing the reader, regardless of age, to take as a matter of fact that normal Praguers share drinks with known water sprites and headless horsemen, that statues act as godparents, and that saints still shape the city as they wish to see it, regardless of the bureaucrats’ intentions. Because if it could happen anywhere, it would be there…”

Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi (highly recommended)
“When the Vakjay’s beloved, spinster daughter Skylark leaves for a week to visit relatives, Mother and Father don’t know quite what to do with themselves. Their lives revolve around their much loved, ugly, dull daughter and in her absence they find themselves doing the most unexpected things. They dine out, reconnect with old friends and make new ones, go to the theatre, and Father even attends one of the Panther drinking club’s infamous Thursday nights (which all of Friday is needed to recover from). It is an inversion of the classic plot of children running wild once adult authority and supervision is removed, but here it is Skylark, the child, whose mild, loving attentions and constant presence at home restricts her parents.”

Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy
“…a strange, strange novel and not in a particularly endearing way. If I hadn’t been reading it for the Eastern European Reading Challenge, I’m not sure I would have stuck with it until the end. It confirmed all of my family’s most dearly held prejudices against Hungarians. Here, they are the dramatic, suicidal, alcoholic, crazy, passionate and rather obsessive eccentrics I have been forever warned about and yet are sadly uninteresting.”

How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulić (highly recommended)
“Although this was written twenty years ago, I was astonished by how informative I found it, how many of the essays brought new details to my attention that have never been mentioned in the histories or even memoirs that I’ve read covering the same area during the same time period. I may be astonished by that, but Drakulić would not be. She knows that the lives and stories she is concerned with, those of normal, unexceptional women, are the ones most easily ignored and most quickly forgotten. And yet by lacking any kind of political power, they were the ones whose lives most clearly mirrored the politics of the day…”

Café Europa by Slavenka Drakulić
“Here, the essays are more cynical, more disappointed, written in the mid-90s when Drakulić was clearly frustrated by the lack of change in post-communist Europe. The governments may have changed but people’s attitudes have not. Whether it is people lying to and cheating the customs officials or the widespread apathy when a democratic government behaves with the arrogance and secrecy of a communist one, citizens mourning a dictator or Bulgarians grudgingly providing customer ‘service’ with a grimace rather than a smile, Drakulić’s observations are always intelligent and absorbingly personal.”

Prague Tales by Jan Neruda (highly recommended)
“All set in the Malá Strana district of Prague…the stories were originally written in the 1860s and 1870s before being collected and published together in Czech in 1878. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect before I started reading. Neruda is primarily remembered as a poet and these are certainly not what I would expect from a poet. Tender and sharp, witty and sympathetic, each story reveals Neruda’s skill as a realist.”

I truly loved my reading challenges for 2011, despite a few issues along the way, and am now in the midst of trying to decide what to join for 2012. The Eastern European Reading Challenge is being continued so that is a definite option but I do also like the idea of trying something new. If you’re participating in or are hosting any challenges next year that you think I might be interested in, please let me know!

Read Full Post »

Reading on the Run

Posted in Essays, Fiction, Jan Neruda, Non-fiction, Politics, Read East 2011, Slavenka Drakulić, Timothy Garton Ash on December 19, 2011| 12 Comments »

"Zlata Ulicka in Winter, Prague" by T.F. Simon

I may be on holiday this week but I’m busier than ever, finishing up my Christmas tasks and getting together with all my friends who are briefly back in town for the holidays. All I want to do now is curl up with a nice, long book (specifically, Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope) but with so many things going on (most recently, acting as shopping assistant for those with no idea of what to buy other family members and who are only just realising this with a few short shopping days left), this does not seem the time to savour that most fondly anticipated book. No, it is clearly a time for short stories and essays, pieces that can be read quickly in the gaps between my other activities.

Following on from How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (which I loved), I picked up Café Europa by Slavenka Drakulić. This volume of essays focuses on post-communist life in Eastern Europe. The book’s tone is very different from How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, which, as the title suggests, generally focused on the positives, on triumphs rather than failures. Here, the essays are more cynical, more disappointed, written in the mid-90s when Drakulić was clearly frustrated by the lack of change in post-communist Europe. The governments may have changed but people’s attitudes have not. Whether it is people lying to and cheating the customs officials or the widespread apathy when a democratic government behaves with the arrogance and secrecy of a communist one, citizens mourning a dictator or Bulgarians grudgingly providing customer ‘service’ with a grimace rather than a smile, Drakulić’s observations are always intelligent and absorbingly personal. She is not a disinterested observer but one who is deeply engaged with her subjects, often guilty of the very behaviours she believes are holding back these countries’ progress. These are essays about nations and people trying to find their place in the world and, especially, in Europe, a place that only a few years before seemed impossibly glamourous and incredibly foreign to all they knew and had experienced. I was most touched by Drakulić’s frustration at constantly being treated like a second-class citizen when abroad, coming up against the stereotype of Eastern Europeans as poor and dirty, cheats and thieves.

From there, I moved on to Prague Tales by Jan Neruda, which was perfect in almost every way. I adored this book and couldn’t bear to put it down. For one day at least I ignored all the other calls for my attention and read this straight through, even though I had picked it up specifically because it was a volume of stories that could be read in bursts. There are 13 tales, varying in length from only a few pages to the 100-page long novellas “A Week in a Quiet House” and “Figures”, which bookend the volume. All set in the Malá Strana district of Prague (coincidentally, my favourite part of the city), the stories were originally written in the 1860s and 1870s before being collected and published together in Czech in 1878. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect before I started reading. Neruda is primarily remembered as a poet and these are certainly not what I would expect from a poet. Tender and sharp, witty and sympathetic, each story reveals Neruda’s skill as a realist. There are simply, brilliantly told everyday tragedies (“A Beggar Brought to Ruin” and “How Mr Vorel Broke In His Meerschaum”), a rather eerie tale of passion (“The Three Lilies”, the story that inspired Pablo Neruda to adopt his pen-name), wonderful comedies (particularly “How It Came to Pass”, about the ill-fated plans of several schoolboys to overthrown their Austrian rulers) and excellent domestic dramas dealing with the intertwined lives of neighbours (“A Week in a Quiet House” and “Figures”). What is particularly striking is how different the tone is from anything that was being written in English at the same time. There is a clarity and crispness to his prose, as well as a confidently satirical style, that reminds me more of books written in the 1920s and 1930s. It is no surprise to find that Karel Čapek used Neruda as a model. Neruda was also a passionate Czech nationalist. At the time he was writing, German was the language of business and literature, of serious people, while Czech was left to the peasants. It is fascinating to read the many comments in these stories relating to that, whether it be a manager demanding his employees cease speaking Czech in the office (our rebellious young narrator refusing to: “I speak Czech long and loudly. My colleagues avoid me like the plague”) or a group of soldiers chatting away about a visit to the Czech theatre, which was performing a German play. I cannot praise this book highly enough and my only concern now is how to obtain a copy of my own (having read a borrowed copy from the library).

After being so delighted by Prague Tales, I decided to move on to something very different, since any other fiction book would do poorly in comparison. Facts Are Subversive by Timothy Garton Ash seemed an excellent contrast, a collection of political essays written between 1 January 2000 and 31 December 2009. With sections devoted to still-evolving Eastern European countries, the idea of Europe itself as a collective (including the excellent “The Perfect EU Member”, an entertaining argument for why Canada represents the EU ideal), Islam, the US (with a historically fascinating essay written directly after 11 September 2001 outlining what Garton Ash saw as the US’s options at the time), Asia, as well as essays on specific writers, books, and films, there is more than enough variety here to choose from. I did pick and choose somewhat, skipping a few of the essays that appealed to me the least or which I had already read when first published. I particularly enjoyed “The Brown Grass of Memory”, Garton Ash’s response to Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion.

And then, feeling the need for something light, I picked up Jane Austen Made Me Do It edited by Laurel Ann Nattress (of Austenprose) and promptly wished I hadn’t. A collection of stories inspired by Jane Austen, I found only a handful of these to be worth reading and my enjoyment of those few was certainly hampered by having to wade through the others to get at them.

I’ve now worked through all the volumes of short stories and essays I had out from the library and find myself longing for a good novel or biography, something cohesive. So on I go, to read about Tommy Douglas and finally try Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw, knowing that at the end of this week, with my commitments filled and these two short books most likely finished, I will be able to pick up Trollope unhindered and escape into Barsetshire in time for Christmas. What bliss!

Read Full Post »

How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed – Slavenka Drakulić

Posted in Essays, Non-fiction, Politics, Read East 2011, Slavenka Drakulić on December 15, 2011| 11 Comments »

First published in English in 1992, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulić is an extraordinarily good collection of essays about women’s lives under and immediately after the end of communism in Eastern Europe. Drakulić, a Croatian journalist and author, does an amazing job of presenting these deeply domestic glimpses into the lives of women and she and her personal experiences are very present in each essay. Although this was written twenty years ago, I was astonished by how informative I found it, how many of the essays brought new details to my attention that have never been mentioned in the histories or even memoirs that I’ve read covering the same area during the same time period. I may be astonished by that, but Drakulić would not be. She knows that the lives and stories she is concerned with, those of normal, unexceptional women, are the ones most easily ignored and most quickly forgotten. And yet by lacking any kind of political power, they were the ones whose lives most clearly mirrored the politics of the day:

Growing up in Eastern Europe you learn very young that politics is not an abstract concept, but a powerful force influencing people’s everyday lives. It was this relationship between political authority and the trivia of daily living, this view from below, that interested me most. And who should I find down there, more removed from the seats of political power, but women. The biggest burden of everyday life was carried by them. Even if they fully participated in revolutionary events, they were less active and less visible in the aftermath of those events.

After the revolutions women still didn’t have time to be involved; they still distrusted politics. At the same time, they deluded themselves that the new democracies would give them the opportunity to stay at home and perhaps rest for a while. There was something else, too: somebody had to take responsibility for finding food and cooking meals, a task made no easier – indeed, in some countries made more difficult – by the political changeover.

Women’s lives, by no means spectacular, banal in fact, say as much about politics as no end of theoretical political analysis. (“The Trivial is Political”)

All of the essays are fascinating. The most political of the essays – “A Chat with My Censors”, for instance, which recounts how Drakulić’s state censor asked to meet for a friendly chat, making no threats but terrifying her merely by announcing his presence – are important and insightful but, for my part, I found the essays that dealt with the day-to-day details of life of the most interest. “Make Up and Other Questions” discusses fashion and cosmetics and their importance and scarcity in communist countries, where vanity items are deemed worthless for its equal citizens and so not widely produced. Fashion, as a joyous thing, a celebration of individual style and perspective, does not exist here:

To avoid uniformity, you have to work very hard: you have to bribe a salesgirl, wait in line for some imported product, buy bluejeans on the black market and pay your whole month’s salary for them; you have to hoard cloth and sew it, imitating the pictures in glamourous foreign magazines. What makes these enormous efforts touching is the way women wear it all, so you can tell they went to the trouble. Nothing is casual about them. They are over-dressed, they put on too much make-up, they match colours and textures badly, revealing their provincial attempt to imitate Western fashion. But where could they learn anything about a self-image, a style? In the party-controlled magazines for women, where they are instructed to be good workers and party members first, then mothers, housewives, and sex objects next, – never themselves? To be yourself, to cultivate individualism, to perceive yourself as an individual in a mass society is dangerous. You might become living proof that the system is failing. Make-up and fashion are crucial because they are political.

Sometimes the simplest essays are the best, like “On Doing Laundry”, reflecting on how that most mundane task has and has not changed over the decades and through the transition from communist government to democracy. And of course, the almost farcical “The Strange Ability of Apartments to Divide and Multiply”, on the complex maneuverings each growing, shrinking, aging, or divorcing family went through during the housing shortage.

Then there are the essays on viewing the outside world through communist eyes. Of course, she always buys western goods when abroad and takes them back to friends and family (most disturbingly, distributing tampons throughout Central Europe where feminine products of any kind were impossible to obtain) and there is the hoarding instinct that comes to the front when exposed to unlimited goods at unheard of prices, whether that item be needed or not (“Some Doubts on Fur Coats”). But there are also upsetting things about the West, about capitalism, and “A Communist Eye, or What Did I See in New York” is an interesting reflection of that. In New York, Drakulić is shocked and disturbed by all the beggars and homeless people, having grown up in a country where, excepting Gypsies, that was unheard of:

Caught between two sets of values, one where beggars are not allowed at all, and the other where beggars are the consequence of capitalism, we simply are not sure how to deal with them.

Each essay had something insightful or entertaining to offer. Overall, a incredibly powerful, engagingly written, important book, presenting fascinating glimpses into the recent past.

Read Full Post »

In Brief

Posted in Anthony Doerr, Fiction, Gyula Krúdy, Justin Cartwright, Mark Greenside, Memoir/Biography, Non-fiction, Read East 2011, Travel on December 11, 2011| 2 Comments »

A few brief reviews to help work through some of my backlog before the end of the year!

Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy is a strange, strange novel and not in a particularly endearing way. If I hadn’t been reading it for the Eastern European Reading Challenge, I’m not sure I would have stuck with it until the end. It confirmed all of my family’s most dearly held prejudices against Hungarians. Here, they are the dramatic, suicidal, alcoholic, crazy, passionate and rather obsessive eccentrics I have been forever warned about and yet are sadly uninteresting. There are ghosts, an apparently endless supply of adulterous women, plenty of amorous men, a noble, upright country gentleman whose male ancestors going back one century have all committed suicide for love of a woman…all very peculiar. And the book is mostly concerned with character portraits of these odd people (which turn into multipage monologues, frequently describing past conquests or erotic fantasies) rather than structuring any kind of solid plot around them. Usually, that wouldn’t be a problem but here it just didn’t work for me. There were numerous passages where I loved the writing but just as many where I found it frustrating.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr, which I first heard about from Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust to Go. Doerr was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rome prize, which awards the winner a stipend of $1,300 US a month, an apartment, and a studio in Rome for a year. With six-month old twins and an exhausted wife in tow, Doerr moves from Boise, Idaho to Rome.

The wonder of this book is Doerr’s beautiful way of describing the details of his deeply domestic Roman life:

Every time I turn around here, I witness a miracle: wisteria pours up walls; slices of sky show through the high arches of a bell tower; water leaks nonstop from the spouts of a half-sunken marble boat in the Piazza di Spagna. A church floor looks soft as flesh; the skin from a ball of mozzarella cheese tastes rich enough to change my life.

Work on the novel Doerr had planned does not go well and though I usually love reading about an author’s writing process, I found these passages tedious. They seemed such a waste of space when Doerr excels at writing about the amazing city he finds himself in and the adventure of raising twins. I particularly loved his comments on how Romans adored and fussed over his babies:

Try this sometime: Park a stroller in the shade in Rome in the winter. Within a minute an Italian mother will stop. ‘They must be put in the sun,’ she’ll say. Once a pair of ladies took the stroller out of my hands and wheeled it thirty feet across a piazza and positioned it themselves.

I finished it desperate to run away to Rome.

In a similar vein, I also enjoyed I’ll Never Be French (no matter what I do) by Mark Greenside. In his late forties, Greenside, an American writer, went on holiday with a girlfriend to Brittany. The relationship didn’t last even the length of the trip but Greenside fell in love with the tiny village where they had been staying. Despite speaking no French and having no money, he soon finds himself, with his mother’s help, the owner of small house in the village, which he lives in when not working in America and rents out the rest of the time. The memoir touches on some of his experiences in Brittany over the years, mostly focusing on the kindness of those who Greenside interacts with and how he is humbled by his new circumstances, as an Anglophone in France, an American in Europe, and a clueless first-time homeowner.

And when it comes to reading about far away places, though Italy and France may be deemed more romantic, there is something just as alluring about Oxford, which is why I picked up Oxford Revisited by Justin Cartwright, a slim volume which mixes Cartwright’s personal memories with a very interesting history of the university. He touches on delightfully random topics, from the tutorial system to bee-keeping, and is full of quotes from and reminders of Oxford’s more famous graduates. And I love how affectionately Cartwright views the university:

From the moment I arrived at Trinity College in the mid-sixties, I was in love with Oxford. It plumped up my dry colonial heart; I loved the first autumn term, the darkness, gowned figures on bicycles, crumpets after rugby, the pale – although not very numerous – girls, the extraordinary buildings and the water running through and around the town. I felt as though I had always known the place, or some simulacrum of it, in another or parallel life.

Read Full Post »

Skylark – Dezső Kosztolányi

Posted in Dezső Kosztolányi, Fiction, NYRB Classics, Read East 2011 on December 1, 2011| 8 Comments »

One of the joys of being a book blogger is being aware of such a huge variety of titles. I must read or at least skim reviews for a hundred different books every week, an alarming number of which go straight onto my TBR list. And I find that really exciting but, at the same time, being well-educated about a book before reading it means that I’m rarely surprised by what I read. I’m used to enjoying and appreciating books but I can usually anticipate how I’m going to feel well before I start the book, just based on what certain other bloggers have thought of it. There’s a comfort to that and it never impairs my enjoyment as a reader but I sometimes miss the sheer delight of starting a wonderful book and finding it to be not at all what I had expected. Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi was just that dash of unexpected brilliance that I’ve been missing lately. Ironically, for someone who has been going on about loving surprises, this review is full of spoilers. Be warned.

It is September 1899 in Sárszeg, an unexceptional town in the heart of Austria-Hungary (modeled on Subotica, Kosztolányi’s hometown in what is now Serbia). When the Vakjay’s beloved, spinster daughter Skylark leaves for a week to visit relatives, Mother and Father don’t know quite what to do with themselves. Their lives revolve around their much loved, ugly, dull daughter and in her absence they find themselves doing the most unexpected things. They dine out, reconnect with old friends and make new ones, go to the theatre, and Father even attends one of the Panther drinking club’s infamous Thursday nights (which all of Friday is needed to recover from). It is an inversion of the classic plot of children running wild once adult authority and supervision is removed, but here it is Skylark, the child, whose mild, loving attentions and constant presence at home restricts her parents.

Mother and Father’s adventures are delightfully and very humourously told, particularly the antics of the Panther club and its intoxicated members. From the moment of Skylark’s departure one Friday to the morning of her return the next, the novel is a charming comedy. Mother and Father are astonished and intrigued by the love affairs of local actors, amazed by the delicious restaurant food (very different than the light, unspiced, but healthful food Skylark cheerfully prepares at home), and energized by their interactions with the townsfolk. And through all this, their reactions are wonderful to behold. No acquaintance goes without comment, no revelation without a full and wondrous appreciativeness. And the Vakjays are such likeable people that you can’t help but adore them and rejoice with them in their enjoyment. But they are simple people who for years have had just one simple wish: to see their daughter married. Every unattached male in town presents a possibility and their hatred of one who once, by walking Skylark home nine years before, briefly gave them cause to hope is complete – and serves as an amusing insight into the Vakjay’s aspirations for Skylark:

He had at one time undoubtedly met with the Vajkay’s highest approval. They could never have wished their daughter a more appropriate suitor. They had always dreamed of a decent, homely type who’d wear unironed broadcloth trousers and a painfully knitted brow; who’d sweat a little and blush when he spoke.

But Skylark is now thirty-five, unmarried, and uglier than ever. For years, the family has gone along, hoping and praying and never speaking of the thing that troubles them most, but finally, in Skylark’s absence, Father stumbles home after a night drinking and unleashes his true feelings, his full anguish to Mother. Without meaning to, their ugly, unremarkable daughter has drained the joy out of their lives and certainly out of her own. They have become used to keeping to themselves, eating always at home, and rarely going out to public places, convincing themselves they don’t want to when the truth is that it is painful and embarrassing for Skylark to go. They all have suffered years and years of disappointments, hoping desperately that someone might come along to marry Skylark, knowing she’s too ugly for anyone to really want to. And each year her future seems even more grim:

‘Do you know how much she’s suffered? Only I know that, with this father’s heart of mine. What with one thing and another. The continual whispering behind her back, the laughter, the scorn, the humiliation. And we too, Mother, how much have we suffered? We waited one year, two years, hoping, as time passed by. We believed it was all a matter of chance. We told ourselves things would get better. But they only got worse. Worse and worse.’

So, though the Vakjays love their daughter, it is only with her away that they can forget their worries, can live for themselves and indulge in their pleasures without feeling guilty for poor, lonely Skylark.

The situation is so frustrating because no one is truly at fault. Skylark can hardly be blamed for being ugly or for wanting to stay among family when she knows how strangers and townspeople react to her appearance. And her parents, who love her above all things, want to make her comfortable and happy, to let her know that she is loved and cherished by them at least. So they allow themselves to be pulled into this relatively isolated way of life. Even when Skylark returns, there’s the assumption that their adventures while she was gone will remain secret. Skylark is helpful and loving, always trying to please everyone and help in any way she can – she is no despot who would ask them to give up the things they love. Her parents do it willingly, out of love.

The final brilliance of this novel is the switch in the very last scene to Skylark’s perspective. The rest of the novel is focused on the senior Vakjays, particularly Skylark’s father, and, as I said before, it is generally quite comedic. But Skylark, even when absent, was always the focus. The contrast of the week she’s spent against her parents’, of her thoughts once home against her parents’ incandescent joy at having her back is heartbreaking and absolutely the perfect way to end this novel, leaving the reader with as much love for Skylark as for her parents.

Skylark is a novel of rare emotional intelligence, perfectly balancing humour with everyday tragedy. So many of the novels about spinsters (and there are many, especially if you’re a Virago fan) focus on the woman herself and, honestly, I’ve not ever had a lot of success with those books. They always seem to have heroines who are subservient to their family’s demands and who meekly try to be of use. Skylark is useful, yes, but she’s also adored, cherished, and at the very centre of her family. She seems a world away from those other women and it seems so much more realistic that her problems, her disappointments are as much hers as they are her parents. Because what is a parent if not the person who loves and cares for you the most, who wants to give you only the happiest of endings and who feels despair and guilt when that does not come?

Read Full Post »

The Legends of Prague – František Langer

Posted in Children/Young Adult, Fiction, František Langer, Read East 2011 on November 21, 2011| 4 Comments »

When I was a child, my grandmother brought me back The Legends of Prague by František Langer when she returned from one of her trips toPrague. Though she had been telling me Czech myths and legends for years, this was the first time I had seen any written down – and in English no less! But while I loved to look at Cyril Bouda’s spirited illustrations, I rarely read the stories themselves. After all, I had a real live storyteller at my disposal for years – what did I need a book for? But ever since I was back in Prague this September I’ve been thinking of all the beautiful books I saw in the stores there, full of the country’s beloved fairy tales and legends, all of which were in Czech. There is nothing more frustrating that spotting a book you want to read but not having the education to be able to do so. Since I’m not likely to suddenly learn Czech, I decided to seek out for the first time in years this slim childhood book with its eight lovingly told legends.

It has been years since my babi used to terrify me with tales of the Vltava’s vicious water sprites but I have never forgotten them. So I was rather surprised when the book began with a trio of quite friendly water sprites. Now, most water sprites are a bit sinister, just waiting for children or fishermen to flounder in the water (occasionally helping them along the way) so that they can then collect the souls of the drowned. Not so these gentlemen. All three featured sprites save rather than take lives and even enjoy communing with other Praguers on dry land in local pubs, theatres, and tobacconists. After hundreds or thousands of years in the river, all three also decamp to dry land, taking up more conventional jobs and assuming roles as pillars of their communities. The stories are very nice and charming, and really quite funny but there is something very wrong with kindly water sprites! I did love the third tale, of the water sprite Mr. Henry, who has spent two thousand years accumulating a vast library in his underwater home, preferring to sit and read his books rather than do his appointed work (his wife is deeply unimpressed with such delinquent behaviour).

These are modern legends, the author having realised that “if I myself did not take a hand in the creation of folklore” the many worthy stories “would be interpreted for all times in the most implausible manner or, at least, in a way unworthy of…old Prague.” Originally published in 1956, they deal with events that are said to have taken place in the relatively recent past: from the 1840s to the 1940s. St Ludmila worries about ugly war memorials being erected in front of her church, the children of Prague find and hide away the St Wenceslaus sword from the occupying Germans, and one of the stone godfathers of Charles Bridge watches proudly as his goddaughter becomes a heroine of the 1848 uprising.

A note of explanation about these stone godfathers: as the citizens of the island of Kampa have sworn to maintain Charles Bridge, so have the statues on the bridge sworn to look over the children of the island. Each time one is born, one of the statue figures assumes the unknown role of godfather, looking after the child throughout his or her life from afar. There is the strong litter carrier whose godson becomes a champion weight lifter. There is the Turk whose ensures that not only his godson but his godson’s descendents are well provided for. And then there is the brave knight who is horrified to find himself godfather to a little girl. A little girl who grows up into an unremarkable young woman who works at the dye works until, bringing despair to her godfather each time he sees her until one day, during the 1848 uprising she shows unexpected bravery when delivery food to the student fighters, rallying the flagging legion who would otherwise have been overrun by Austrian troops. Forever afterwards, even as the girl returns to a distinctly unmemorable domestic life, her godfather remains delighted with her, remembering the brief, pivotal moment when his legacy to her helped protect their beloved city:

He had a good view of her that time from his position and he was happy that when he could not himself descend from his pedestal to assist Prague, he was so ably represented by his godchild. Whenever she passed over the bridge afterwards, his chest would swell with pride and he would raise his knightly sword in greeting and look boastfully about at the other statues. Of course it was hardly likely anyone else would notice and, if they did, they would have been most surprised that he so highly honoured the wife of a stove-fitter, later a plump mother, who led her children over the bridge in mortal fear of them being run over by a horse and cart or a hackney cab.

The translation is a bit awkward at points but the stories still have a lovely flow to them. All the legends are related in a very warm, confiding, conversational tone. The stories from 1939 and 1940 are particularly patriotic and sentimental, reminding children that though the darkest days have not yet come (for, as everyone knows, in the darkest days St Wenceslaus and the Knights of Blanik will return to destroy the enemies of the Czech Lands) they must “grow well and grow strong and be of good stature so that you are brave and of firm resolve when your time comes.” Oh yes, I teared up. While these stories are definitely friendlier and less bloodthirsty than the ones I adored as a child, they captivating and delightful. And they do what any book about Prague should do: bring the magic of that city to life, allowing the reader, regardless of age, to take as a matter of fact that normal Praguers share drinks with known water sprites and headless horsemen, that statues act as godparents, and that saints still shape the city as they wish to see it, regardless of the bureaucrats’ intentions. Because if it could happen anywhere, it would be there: “Do you understand? Prague is a vision, a dream, an enchantment.”

Read Full Post »

The Gardener’s Year – Karel Čapek

Posted in Essays, Gardens and Gardening, Karel Čapek, Non-fiction, Read East 2011 on June 30, 2011| 8 Comments »

I am slowly becoming a gardener. As a child I always helped in the garden, always weeded and watered and fertilized as directed but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started taking an active interest in gardening. Even when all I had was my little balcony in Calgary, how exciting it was to choose my plants! To plant and care for them! Even dead-heading became a sacred occupation, and I picked wilted petunia blossoms off with unrivalled discipline and care, snipped off browning roses with manic zeal.

And now that I have a real garden to work in – and a climate that doesn’t feel the need to have frosts in July and August – my enthusiasm has only grown, along with my anxiety. I read The Gardener’s Year by Karel Čapek (a good Czech and friend of my great-grandfather and, yes, I’m bragging about that because it is pretty darn cool and I’ve relatively few connections to literary figures, aside from Alice Munro) in early June, just as the garden was coming to life and oh, what a perfect book and what a perfect time to read it!

The Gardener’s Year is a selection of humourous essays on a year in the life of a gardener. It is very much about the gardener and his stresses and joys rather than the garden itself, which is what makes it so very enjoyable and timeless. Even new as I am to the obsession, my own recent gardening plights, the missteps and mistakes that were weighing heavily on my soul, were perfectly echoed by Čapek, as though he had been in the garden witnessing my incompetence only a few days previously:

…nobody knows how it happens, but it occurs strikingly often that when you step on a bed to pick up some dry twig, or to pull out a dandelion, you usually tread on a shoot of the lily or trollius; it crunches under your foot, and you sicken with horror and shame; and you take yourself for a monster under whose hooves grass will not grow. Or with infinite care you loosen the soil in a bed, with the inevitable result that you chop with the hoe a germinating bulb, or neatly cut off with the spade the sprouts of anemones; when, horrified, you start back, you crush with your paw a primula in flower, or break the young plume of a delphinium. The more anxiously you work, the more damage you make; only years of practice will teach you the mysteries and bold certainty of a real gardener, who treads at random, and yet tramples on nothing; or if he does, at least he doesn’t mind. (p. 51)

As June has progresses and I’ve watched unusually savage rains beat the petals off my snapdragons and cosmos and cold snaps stunt my roses, I’ve often thought back on Čapek’s gardener’s prayer (and repeated it, to little effect):

If it were of any use, every day the gardener would fall on his knees and pray somehow like this: ‘O Lord, grant that in some way it may rain every day, say from about midnight until three o’clock in the morning, but, you see, it must be gentle and warm so that it can soak it; grant that at the same time it would not rain on campion, alyssum, helianthemum, lavender, and the others which you in your infinite wisdom know are drought-loving plants – I will write their names of a bit of paper if you like – and grant that the sun may shine the whole day long, but not everywhere (not, for instance, on spiraea, or on gentian, plantain lily, and rhododendron), and not too much; that there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough worms, no plant lice and snails, no mildew, and that once a week thin liquid manure and guano may fall from heaven. Amen.’ (p. 82-83)

The illustrations by Josef Čapek are no less delightful than the text, particularly the ones featuring the gardener as contortionist, hunched and bent and stretched entirely out of shape in order to service each unreachable corner of garden.

Whether he’s lamenting the weather, lampooning the holidaying gardener’s instructions to his substitute or considering the traitorous and unpredictable nature of the garden hose, Čapek is always light-hearted, charming and, above all, affectionate. He is able to recognize and brilliantly capture the ridiculous habits and mindsets of gardeners but he can only do it with such skill and accuracy because he is one himself and thinks as they think, feels as they feel. Or, I suppose I should now say as a gardener, however amateur, as we think, as we feel:

Let no man think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart. (p. 13)

Read Full Post »

Far to Go – Alison Pick

Posted in Alison Pick, Canadian Book Challenge 4, Fiction, Read East 2011 on May 24, 2011| 2 Comments »

I am somewhat troubled by how under whelmed I was by Far to Go by Alison Pick. This really should be a book that I have strong feelings about – it was, after all, a book I was quite excited to read, so much so that I requested a copy from the publisher; when have I ever been able to refuse a book about Czechoslovakia, never mind one set in the exciting years of 1938 and 1939 and written by a Canadian? And yet even as I was reading it, I felt strangely disconnected from it. It was neither glaringly bad nor especially good.

I think the single biggest problem was that I resented the modern narrator, Lisa, for her role in the story. I liked it quite well as the tale of the Jewish Bauers, Pavel, Anneliese, and their son Pepik (Joseph), and Pepik’s loyal governess, Marta, trying to negotiate the terrifying changes brought on first by the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland and then Hitler’s full-fledged occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, beginning in March 1939. For a Czech nationalist and patriot like Pavel, a man who did not actively observe the faith that would see him condemned, the loss of his business, his wealth, and his autonomy are heavy blows. Pavel and Anneliese are able to get Pepik a spot on the Kindertransport when their plans to escape as a family are thwarted, sending him to, they hope, a safe and loving home in Scotland. And while the majority of the novel is set in the late thirties, each section begins with a first person narrative from the researcher Lisa, trying to meet up with the adult Joseph. It is their meeting and the truths it reveals that do not sit well with me. Her revelations completely alter the way Joseph had conceived of his past, which is upsetting for him but fine by me, but then we learn that the whole story, the entire book was really Lisa’s way of trying to make sense of what she knows of the past, a fiction within fiction, which seems too clever by half. There’s also a sort of half-hearted reference – repeated so that you do not miss it – to a female lover of Lisa’s, which does not really add anything and seems there more to titillate than add to her character. It seemed a bit cheap, frankly, and I could have done without it.

However, Pick does an excellent job with her characterization of her main characters, particularly her primary narrator Marta, and the best moments are sometimes the quietest ones. Most of the novel takes place in the home, and the domestic scenes are the best: Marta alone in the Prague apartment, venting her frustrations by vigourously scrubbing the floor; Pavel coming home and breaking the news of Beneš’ resignation; Marta and Anneliese negotiating how to tell Pepik of his upcoming journey to Scotland. More than anything, I was struck by the scene presented by Pavel and Anneliese’s return from a night out and their recounting of the swell of patriotism expressed by their countrymen and women in a city already captured. A scene that, like Marta, I can well imagine and be touched by, even without having witnessed it:

Only once that month did she and Pavel go out together, to the National Theatre. They returned to the flat after curfew, cheeks flushed pink with the cold. The Prague Symphony’s rendition of Bedřich Smetana’s patriotic suite, “Má Vlast”, had been followed by a standing ovation, Pavel said, that lasted a full quarter of an hour. His eyes shone as he told Marta about the tears in the audience, the cheers and whistles from the otherwise refined European elite. The applause stopped only when the conductor actually kissed the score and held it above his head, like an Olympic athlete with a medal. (p. 214)

Pick is very good with the tiny details: the untranslated bits of conversation in Czech, the mentions of delicious national dishes and timeless traditions, and the throw-away remarks about the ease of obtaining an entrance visa for Britain after the Munich Agreement, “an apology for the betrayal” (p. 157). But her attempts at foreshadowing felt clumsy and forced and there was little grace to the flow of the story as a whole. I cared about the characters, particularly Marta, but that did not prevent me from occasionally becoming frustrated with Pick’s writing style (there is a particularly irritating simile about Marta and Anneliese being like runners in a three-legged race that I wish I could forget). But the story is interesting and, on the whole, the book’s positive features outweigh its flaws.

Read Full Post »

The Russian Album – Michael Ignatieff

Posted in Canadian Book Challenge 4, Memoir/Biography, Michael Ignatieff, Non-fiction, Read East 2011 on April 28, 2011| 2 Comments »

After my grandfather retired in the 1980s, he and my grandmother devoted themselves to working on the family tree. In the days before the internet with its quick online database searches, this meant filing cabinets full of meticulous notes, phone bills for long distance calls to records offices all over the world, and, most excitingly, trips around the globe to ferret out existing relatives. They loved it. When one family tree was done, they’d move on to another branch of the family and so they continued for years, happily gathering and recording stories before they were forgotten. For them, this was important work. It was important to them that they know who came before and that they pass that knowledge down to their children and grandchildren so that we too would know. I took that to heart as a child. I already loved history but it became more important to me when I considered events that I knew had impacted my family. It made it more personal and, because of that, far more exciting.

The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff feeds directly into my fascination with family history; it is the story of four generations of the aristocratic Ignatieff family, focusing primarily on his grandparents, Princess Natasha Mestchersky and Count Paul Ignatieff, who leftRussia in 1919 with their sons, moving first toEngland before settling inCanada. Ignatieff never met Natasha or Paul – both died before he was born – but he had their memoirs to work from as well as the recollections of his father and uncles. The result is a thoughtful, intimate book, absolutely worthy of all the praise that has been heaped upon it since it was first published in 1987.

This is a strange review to write at this time. When Michael Igantieff wrote this book he was a Canadian ex-pat author and academic living in theUK. Now, he is the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, the official opposition to the current Conservative government, campaigning across the country in preparation for Monday’s federal election. It feels strange to be writing here about a person who appears every night on the news, who shows up every day in my newspaper. This book has absolutely nothing to do with politics and nor does my reaction to it but the upcoming election does make me hesitant to offer an opinion on Ignatieff that goes beyond his writing ability. I shall do so anyway but please, my few Canadian readers, do not think I am attempting to influence your vote by doing so. This is not an attempt at political propaganda; it is just a simple book review.

The first chapter is rather daunting, full of Ignatieff’s academic musings on ethics and methodology, but it also contains some of his most personal and thoughtful passages, the ones that made me warm to him. In Alan Bennett’s The History Boys Hector says: “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone who is even long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” That is why I read, searching for moments, for writers, who can do that. And Ignatieff does, distilling what I have perhaps always thought and felt about my own family and my own situation but never been able to express, in just the way I would have wished to have said it:

Between my two pasts, the Canadian and the Russian, I felt I had to choose. The exotic always exerts a stronger lure than the familiar and I was always my father’s son. I chose the vanished past, the past lost behind the revolution. I could count on my mother’s inheritance: it was always there. It was my father’s past that mattered to me, because it was one I had to recover, to make my own. (p. 10)

My father’s family, full of farmers and teachers, librarians and ministers, has always provided stability for me. That part of my identity is clear. They are Canadian just as I am, they grew up in surroundings I can relate to, spoke a language I speak, were part of the history I was taught in school. My mother’s family is different. Alien and alluring, I cannot remember a time when I did not want to know more about them, to see the cities where they lived, to hear the languages they spoke- anything to try and understand these foresters and executioners, dilettantes and opera singers who I am descended from. But I have their photos and painted portraits, can stare into their faces in an attempt to know them. There is something so reassuring about having a visual record of your past:

For many families, photographs are often the only artefacts to survive the passage through exile, migration or the pawnshop. In a secular culture, they are the only household icons, the only objects that perform the religious function of connecting the living to the dead and of locating the identity of the living in time. I never feel I know my friends until either I meet their parents or see their photographs and since this rarely happens, I often wonder if I know anybody very well. (p.2)

This idea of not knowing anyone well without knowing or having seen their family really resonated with me. It is not something I had ever thought to analyse before but I am definitely not entirely comfortable with anyone until I’ve met their family or, if their relatives are too far away or no longer alive, seen their photographs. I can know people for years but as soon as I meet their parents there is suddenly a new level of intimacy in the relationship.

However, let me be clear, this is a book primarily about Ignatieff’s ancestors and not his relationship to his family’s past (even if that is what I found most interesting about it). I cannot claim any great knowledge of Tsarist Russia – you’ll notice it has not come up in many of my previous reading choices – but it is fascinating to see how the Ignatieff family served their homeland as soldiers and, far more interestingly, diplomats and politicians. If nothing else, one must hope that after four generation an immunity to insult would now be inbred. Certainly nothing said today can equal Lord Salisbury’s style back in 1877 in describing Ignatieff’s great grandfather Nicholas as a “brilliant and fluent talker who adorns his conversations with fictions so audaciously unconvincing as to become a constant source of amusement.” If politicians could construct such well-phrased insults today then I should be pleased to listen to them!

Though it is his male ancestors who spent their time doing things that would later see them remembered in history books, Ignatieff does not ignore his female relatives. It feels as if more attention is given to his grandmother Natasha than to her husband Paul and she is spoken of almost with awe. Though not a warm woman, she comes across as brave and determined, more than able to face the many challenges that awaited her after the Revolution began:

That autumn of 1918 the boys first became aware of how much the times had changed their mother. She was no longer the frail, vague, comical and retiring figure of their childhood inPetrograd. Hardship had weathered her. During their father’s arrest, she had been like a tigress, enraged, tenacious and unafraid. Now that most of the servants had gone, she took over the housekeeping. She had never so much as boiled water in her life before. Now they watched her leave the house in the morning dressed in a shabby black overcoat, with her hair in a peasant woman’s shawl, to queue at the baker’s for crumbling loaves made out of corn, potato flour and bran. One of the boys went with her when she travelled out into the villages to bargain for mutton, cooking far and honey. She had become sharp and shrewd and resilient. And she never railed at fate. (p. 136-137)

My only quibble with the book is the limited glimpse you get into the family’s life once settled in Canada. While his uncles and his father were still alive, perhaps it seemed too intimate to discuss in more than the barest of details. Or perhaps I am just being greedy because I desperately want to know more about George Ignatieff, Michael’s father, who was a contemporary and friend of Lester Pearson (Prime Minister) and Charles Ritchie (the noted diplomat and diarist). I read Charles Ritchie’s The Siren Years as an impressionable adolescent and ever since have had a growing passion for the Canadian diplomats of his generation, particularly the ones, like Pearson, Ignatieff, and Ritchie, who worked out of Canada House in London during the war. But then the purpose of this book wasn’t to chronicle a new beginning. It is not a narrative that can be neatly wrapped up and given a happy ending. The purpose was simply to remember:

I have not been on a voyage of self-discovery: I have just been keeping a promise to two people I never knew. These strangers are dear to me not because their lives contain the secret of my own, but because they saved their memory for my sake. They beamed out a signal to a generation they would never live to see. They kept faith with me and that is why I must keep faith with them and with those who are coming after me. There is no way of knowing what my children will make of ancestors from the age of dusty roads and long afternoons on the shaded veranda deep in the Russian countryside. But I want to leave the road marked and lighted, so that they can travel into the darkness ahead, as I do, sure of the road behind. (p. 185)

Read Full Post »

The Snows of Yesteryear – Gregor von Rezzori

Posted in Gregor von Rezzori, Memoir/Biography, Non-fiction, NYRB Classics, Read East 2011 on March 14, 2011| 9 Comments »

I can still vaguely recall the days when I used to review books in a timely fashion, sometimes even within a day or two of finishing them. My standards have, shall we say, relaxed somewhat since then but I still usually try to write reviews within a week, at most two, of reading the book. Whoops. February and March have been interesting months for me, going between intense periods of reading and then weeklong breaks where even picking up the newspaper seemed too onerous. But I think, I certainly hope, all that is behind me now and I can focus on reviewing some of the books I read over the past two months, beginning with The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor von Rezzori.

I mentioned this title when I made my reading list for the Eastern European Reading Challenge (and let us take a brief moment to celebrate the fact that I finally read a book that fits into one of my challenges!) though I had very little idea at the time what it was about. I knew it was a memoir of growing up in Austria-Hungary/Romania by someone with a von-ified Italian surname. Honestly, that’s all the encouragement I ever need. Throw in a few photographs (there are several at the beginning of each section) and I’m done for.

Strictly speaking, yes, this is a memoir but really it is von Rezzori telling the life stories of those who surrounded him in his childhood and adolescence. He is their biographer but also our subject. Through portraits of five others – his nurse, his mother, his father, his sister, and his governess – von Rezzori tells the story of his family and his early life, a strangely rootless existence begun in Czernowitz (in Austria-Hungary) in 1914. His homeland eventually became part of Romania and von Rezzori seems to have accepted and love his new country though he was ethnically anything but Romanian. One of the things I’m always interested to read about in memoirs from this period is the writer’s perspective on the rise of the national socialists in Germany. This is, after all, a memoir of the inter-war years and what could be more interesting that the views of ethnic and linguistic minorities in the new self-determined states, like Romania?

From our viewpoint, the developments in Germany were welcome: a profusion of optimistic images of youth bursting with health and energy, promising to build a sunny new future – this corresponded to our own political mood. We were irked by the disdain with which we as the German-speaking minority were treated, as if the former Austrian dominion in Romania had been one of Teutonic barbarism over the ancient and highly cultured Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks, and Wallachians, as if these had freed themselves from their oppressive bondage in the name of civilizing morality. The bitterness of the defeat suffered with Germany rankled in us, and we felt good when we saw that in Germany, a new self-reliance refused to accept that a people vanquished was a people despised. (p. 129)

In speaking about those closest to him, or at least those most central to his formative years, von Rezzori considers them not just as people with their own concerns and agendas but as influences on his development. Cassandra, his peasant nurse, is remembered most affectionately and Bunchy, the family’s governess, with great respect and admiration. His feelings towards his blood relatives are more conflicted.

His neurotic, controlling mother inspired little affection in either of her children, preferring to focus on or concoct her own personal dramas. A quarrelsome, angry woman, she divorced (or at least separated from) two husbands and then cast herself as the victim. She sounded alarmingly like some of my female relatives, which does little to calm my fears that all Slavic women eventually turn out to be crazy. Please, if you can find a book that counteracts this theory, send me the title. Now. Give me hope for the future.

Von Rezzori is much more sympathetic towards his father, a larger-than-life figure, fond of hunting, drinking and wenching. He is grand and effusive, full of lust and emotion and is a figure straight out of a comic opera. I’m a bit in love with him myself. Father and son weren’t particularly close but it’s clear that von Rezzori adored him and was more than a little jealous of the intensely close bond between his father and his sister. So much of both the sections on his father and on his sister are taken up discussing their relationship, enviously remembering how easily and affectionately they interacted. Von Rezzori’s father was not an easy man to get along with, indeed it sounds as though he was quick to offend and slow to apologize, but his daughter was the exception. Enviously, von Rezzori describes their relationship, in awe of not just the close father-daughter bond but the genuine friendship between the two:

In the case of my sister, the chemistry was right: she was blood of his blood, though quieted by the thinner blood of our mother, and curbed as well by a clear intelligence, similar to his own but more disciplined. Her love for him was as unconditional as it was luminous. She would sometimes shake her head at him but laughed as she did so. In amusement she would follow his scurrilous train of thought, and she always knew what was meant as a joke and what was to be taken seriously. Her attitude towards his escapades was one of maternal tolerance, and whenever he went too far, she found an outlet for her irritation in the convulsive laughter that shook both of us when we spoke of the vagaries of family life. (p. 170)

Von Rezzori’s emotions towards most of the people in his life are generally straightforward. Affection for the women who raised him, general disinterest and sympathy for his troubled mother, awe of his father. Not so with his sister who died age only twenty two. For me, this is by far the best section of the book; emotional and beautifully written, it is the part where you learn most about von Rezzori himself, about what he feels and thinks and how he became who he is. It begins with, I think, the most beautifully written passage of the entire memoir:

Now that I write this down, she has been dead for fifty-six years and not one of those years has gone by without her being close to me in an almost corporeal way – not in the abstract sense of a loving preserving memory, but in a well-nigh physical presence, often anything but welcome. Whatever I do or fail to do, whatever happens to me, observing; at times I even call her to make sure she’s there. For fifty-six years – a whole life span – there has not been for me a single happy or unhappy moment, neither success nor failure, no significant or even halfway noteworthy occurrence on which she might not have commented. She is mute but she is there. My life is a wordless dialogue with her, to which she remains unmoved: I monologize in front of her. (p. 193)

For such a short life, this chapter is filled with emotion. It’s restrained but intensely moving. He seems to have resented her, was clearly jealous of the adoring relationship between her and their father, but all the same he was in awe of her. Of all his relationships, this was probably the most complicated and therefore the most interesting. She was, he carefully points out, extraordinary, explaining how years after her death he’d shown some of her writing to a psychologist friend who exclaimed over its maturity and insight, marveling that a young woman of barely twenty could have written with the kind of self-awareness usually seen in those twenty or thirty years her senior. How, as a younger sibling, do you ever make peace with that? Most siblings eventually mature and put aside their childhood rivalries in adulthood. But von Rezzori was still a teenager when his sister died. They had never been particularly close and they never had the chance to meet each other as equals, to come to respect one another as adults and he remains haunted by her ghost, engaged in a never-ending competition with a woman he hardly knew, who he’ll always feel the need to impress.

My one quibble with his analysis of his sister – indeed, my only issue with the book in its entirety – is his insistence that she belonged to a lost world, to the ordered discipline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that it was her incompatibility with the post-war reality that lead to her death. This seems like the over-romanticized fantasies of a dreamy boy. But that’s the thing about memoirs: what’s more important, who the person actually was or who they were to the memoirist? For von Rezzori, his mother is his mother. She is referred to by no other name, has no individual self, the same for his father and his sister. It is always ‘my sister’ or ‘my mother’. Their actual identity ceases to be important in such instances. They matter because of how they influenced the writer, however falsely they may be remembered.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »