Sholom Aleichem's In The Storm

"Hearken, O ye nations! Heed, O ye peoples of the world, what my mouth will utter now. Waken from your slumbers, raise your eyes, look about you and see the darkening sky. Black clouds are gathering above, a mighty wind drives them with great speed and they cover the entire sky. Soon, soon, a storm will be breaking. Soon, soon, the thunderclouds will burst and a great storm will pelt down, not of water but of blood." [187]

That's the storm of In The Storm, Sholom Aleichem's novel set in the year 1905. Lippa Bashevitch, an uneducated wood-hauler, has been driven half-mad by events.

But it's not all in such a high register and even Lippa can't sustain that. Immediately afterwards one of the other characters says, "Reb Lippa! Perhaps you would like something to eat?"

1905 is an important year in Russian history. Russia has just--shockingly--lost the Russo-Japanese War. The events of the Russian Bloody Sunday--where peaceful marchers in St. Petersburg are fired on by police--is an important moment in the novel. The Tsar feels compelled to offer the people, temporarily as it turns out, a constitution. "Constitutzia, constitutzia!"

(It's also the time of the movie Battleship Potemkin, though none of those events show up in the book.)

The novel starts in Kiev: "Three different Pesachs were being prepared at No. 13 Vasilchikover Street." These Passover preparations are in the apartments of Itzikl Shostepol, Solomon Safranovitch, and Nehemiah the shoemaker. (Lippa Bashevitch supplies the building with firewood.) Itzikl Shostepol is a well-to-do merchant and religious; Solomon Safranovitch is a middle-class pharmacist and secularizing; Nehemiah is poor and lives in the basement. But all three have children who are engaged with the ideological currents flowing through Russia at the time.

At the start of the novel Tamara Shostepol and Sasha Safranovitch are about to return to Kiev for the holiday from St. Petersburg where they have been studying. They arrive on the same train, and, while as far as their fathers are concerned, they're not supposed to know each other since they're from different economic classes, they do, having grown up in the same building. 

The novel then flashes back to events in St. Petersburg and that Bloody Sunday in January. The second half of the novel returns to Kiev. The tsar revokes the constitution later that year and scapegoats the Jews for Russia's failures. A series of pogroms erupts including one in Kiev. Our characters have to make serious choices.

Sholom Aleichem himself lived through that Kiev pogrom, though he was well-enough off at the time to take his family and hole up anonymously in a hotel. But that was the event that led to Aleichem leaving Russia. "Palestine and America--what a choice!" [219]

Aleichem is often written off at the sentimentalizing chronicler of shtetl life, he of Kasrilevke and Tevye and Fiddler on the Roof. (Great as I find Fiddler on the Roof to be.) I already knew there was more to him than that, but still this novel was a surprise. It's a very urban setting. It also represents the division between a more politicized second generation and their more accommodationist parents, a novel of the sort you see in The Demons (Dostoevsky) and Fathers and Sons (Turgenev). It's also stylistically quite interesting, with various modes: a telegraphic biography of a police spy, e.g., or what seem to be excerpts from police reports. Reading it in translation the interplay between Hebrew and Yiddish will inevitably mostly go past me, but the translation by Aliza Shevrin seems strong and she's able to make some of that apparent.

A few years ago I read Jeremy Dauber's biography of Aleichem and I got it back from the library to see what he said about the novel. The novel was first serialized in the spring of 1906 in the left-wing New York Yiddish paper Varheit, under the title The Deluge. Aleichem rewrote it before it appeared as a novel under the current title. 

At that time Aleichem was new to New York, having fled the Kiev pogrom. His family was still in Europe, his older children at school in Switzerland. He had just had two failures on the New York Yiddish stage, possibly because Aleichem, not knowing New York, had offended the wrong claques. Already a pretty well-known writer, but never, it seems, very astute with money, he needed it badly at the time, and a contract for a serialized novel was a huge boon. (I also have to assume that the Yiddish press was not so well-established at the time that it could pay its authors all that well.)

Highly recommended.

"Come with me, reader, give me your hand, let us proceed--we have a long, long way to go!" [21]

"Why are we standing here? It's time to say goodbye!" [220] 

Not such a long way as all that at 220 pages, but a good one.  

Note: His name is usually transliterated Sholem Aleichem these days, but I spelled it Sholom throughout since that's the way it appears on the cover of my edition of In The Storm. 

Two by Amélie Nothomb (#WITMonth)

It's Women in Translation month! I had one unread Amélie Nothomb novel on the shelf, and I got another one from the library.

Thirst

I read the library book first. Thirst is her most recent novel in English; it came out earlier this year. The French dates from 2019, but it isn't her most recent novel in French. (Well, she keeps busy.) 

Christ tells his own story, from his condemnation by Pontius Pilate until after his resurrection. He's wry and jokey about it until the pain doesn't allow that any more:

"The jailer said to me:

'Try to get some sleep. You need to be in good shape tomorrow.'

On seeing my ironic expression, he added:

'Don't laugh. It takes good health to die. Don't say I didn't warn you.'" [17]

"As to calling her Mary, [Mary Magdalene] that's out of the question. It's never a good idea to confuse your sweetheart with your mother." [27]

He discusses, wonders almost, about the nature of religious inspiration, of mysticism:

"It's no coincidence that I chose this part of the world...I needed a land of great thirst. No other sensation more eloquently evokes what I seek to inspire than thirst. That is surely why no one has experienced it as I have.

Truth to tell: what you feel when  you are dying of thirst is something you must cultivate. Therein lies the mystical urge. It is not its metaphor. When you are no longer hungry, that is called satiety. When you are no longer tired, that is called rest. When you cease to suffer, that is called comfort. When you are no longer thirsty, there is no word for it.

...

There are people who do not consider themselves mystics. They are wrong. It takes only a moment of extreme thirst to attain such a state. And the ineffable state when the parched man raises a glass of water to his lips: that is God." [34-5]

I thought Nothomb's handling of the psychology of Christ's moment of doubt was well done. (The "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" moment.) On the whole I thought it was a sympathetic portrait of Christ, and one that, while not orthodox, wouldn't necessarily offend a believer. (Though there are those believers who are easily offended.) The least orthodox moment was after the resurrection. Christ appears, but it's a distinctly non-bodily resurrection.

"To experience thirst, you must be alive. I lived so intensely that I died thirsting.

Perhaps that is what is meant by eternal life." [90]

It's a thoughtful and interesting volume and not what I expected. (Which is generally a good thing.)

But. There was some classical Greek in the book which was wrong. Christ distinguishes between why and how in Greek and then misspells how. I'm not sure what to make of that. (I looked and saw it was also wrong in the French.) Additionally Christ says, "Christ means gentle."[40] Maybe the actual Christ is gentle, though he claims not in the context. (Rather, it's mother who is gentle.) But the word doesn't mean that. It means the anointed one. 

On the other hand, while his Greek may be poor, he can quote Latin. (A language the historical Christ was less likely to know.) "Homo sum. Humani a me nihil alienum puto." "I am a man. I think nothing human is alien to me," is from Terence's Heautontimorumenos, and Christ paraphrases it twice. 

Tokyo Fiancée

My first experience of any sort with Amélie Nothomb was the movie version of Tokyo Fiancée. Before that she was just a name to me, but when the movie showed up for the film festival here in Toronto in 2014, I thought, oh, I'm curious about her, let's see that one. I usually try to read the novel before seeing the movie, but I didn't and just read it now. The novel came out in French in 2007, in English in 2009.

'Amélie,' the character, lived in Japan until she was five years old. Now twenty or so, she decides to go back to Japan to get in touch with her roots, learn the language. She's going to teach French to pay her way. 

Her first pupil is Rinri, the son of a well-to-do family of jewellers. She and Rinri get along from the start. He may be more interested in her than she him, but she definitely likes him. But his parents are suspicious of this footloose foreign woman (and his grandparents even more suspicious) and she has a roommate. Where to meet? "In love, as in anything, infrastructure is everything." [49] Eventually her roommate goes off for a trip; then his parents leave for a while. Rinri is capable of good cooking. (Though not always--when he tries Western dishes he fails.) They go on the sort of jaunts that young Japanese couples go on. Eventually Rinri, who has easy access to good jewelry, proposes with a ring and 'Amélie' accepts. Was this the right thing for her to do? 

Our 'Amélie' is also interested in writing. Is marriage compatible with a career as a writer? The novel is set in the late 80s, and 'Amélie' writes a novel with the same title as the first novel of the actual Amélie Nothomb.

The movie pushes events forward by twenty years, and while the first two-thirds of the movie corresponds pretty well to the novel, the endings are quite different. But both are pretty engaging.

I've now read four of Amélie Nothomb's novels, which might sound impressive except that they are all pretty short and they represent a mere 14% of her novels. Nevertheless...I'm going to make a sweeping generalization. 😉 She starts off with jokes--good jokes, they are pretty funny--but then she swerves into something more serious and the novels engage--in an interesting way--with more serious issues. (Mysticism, career, war, friendship.) Of the ones I've read, I thought Tokyo Fiancée was the best, but I will read more.

Both of these were ably translated by Alison Anderson.

"As always in my life I was the only Belgian." [25]

Most of Tokyo Fiancée takes place in Japan, but a bit of it takes place in Belgium, making it my entry for Belgium for the European Reading Challenge...

Of the Time of Nero (#ccspin)

 

Here we have Hubert arbiting some elegances 

My spin book this time was Henryk Sienkiewicz' Quo Vadis, which set off a mini-reading project.

Petronius' The Satyricon

I knew Caius Petronius was a major character in Quo Vadis, and I thought I'd reread The Satyricon in advance. It's mostly accepted (though not universally) that Petronius, author of The Satyricon, is that Caius Petronius mentioned as the Elegantiae Arbiter of Nero's court in Tacitus. (Though maybe not: it's a common enough family name in Rome.)

What we have of The Satyricon is pretty fragmentary; parts, we're told, of Books XV and XVI, amounting to 164 pages in William Arrowsmith's translation. Even the exact meaning of the title is uncertain. For a Roman (as also a bit for us) it probably suggests several things: Satyrs (and thus lechery), satire, but also satura, a Roman word meaning heap or medley. The longest continuous surviving stretch is the dinner at Trimalchio's, who is a freedman working for the Imperial court, with lots of money and little taste and maudlin when drunk. It's amusing to see the sort of thing a rich Roman would have been eating at the time. It makes turducken look like an exercise in restraint.

It's not possible to say much with certainty about the work. If the note attached to the late medieval manuscript is correct about books XV and XVI,  it would be a very long work, even if there were only 16 books--and 24 would be a significant number for an ancient author.  Encolpius--the (loosely speaking) hero--of the book cons his way through life, cadging free dinners where he can, and sleeping (or trying to) with anything that moves. He hangs out with grammarians, professors of rhetoric, poets, so he seems to be an educated man, but there's something criminal in his background. Also he's managed to offend the god Priapus, with an unwelcome effect on his, umm, priapic appendage, and is on a quest to get back in good with the god, and go on sleeping around. (Probably. The book is fragmentary.) It is a severe judgment of its society. I find it funny in places, but your mileage may vary: some of the jokes are pretty insider-y Roman.

I took an undergraduate class on Petronius. We read a good chunk of the book in Latin, and as well as all of it in Arrowsmith's translation. I must have read the introduction--which is quite good--but I was amused now with how engaged Arrowsmith was with Lolita. (His translation comes out in 1959.) He calls Lolita a failure--twice. I'm sure I hadn't read Lolita at the time. It's not a comparison that would have occurred to me though. The sexual abuse of children is the meeting point, I suppose, but they're not really very much alike. Rather The Satyricon's embedded poetry, commentary thereon, and comically epic plot is more Pale Fire than Lolita. (Though The Satyricon is not either of them, of course.)

Tacitus' Annals

I enjoyed The Satyricon, but in the end I don't think rereading it brought much to Quo Vadis. Sienkiewicz accepts the attribution to Caius Petronius, but it doesn't otherwise feel like it impacts. Much more useful were the Annals, Tacitus' history of Rome from the death of Augustus to the death of Nero. (A.D. 14 - A.D. 68). Moses Hadas, in his introduction, notes that "Sienkiewicz' Quo Vadis... [has] long sections which are but adaptations of Tacitus." True that, Moze.

I thought one of the best things in Quo Vadis was the portrait of Petronius. Sienkiewicz is certainly taking off from Tacitus:

"His [Petronius'] days he passed in sleep, his nights in business and pleasures of life. Indolence had raised him to fame, as energy raises others, and he was reckoned not a debauchee and spendthrift, like most who squander their substance, but a man of refined luxury. And indeed his talk and his doings, the freer they were and the more show of carelessness they exhibited, were the better liked, for their look of natural simplicity...Then falling back into vice or affecting vice, he was chosen by Nero to be on of his few intimate associates, as a critic in matters of taste, while the emperor thought nothing charming or elegant in luxury unless Petronius had expressed to him his approval of it." [Annals 16.18, tr. Church and Broadribb]

Also, the great fire of Rome during Nero's reign. (July, A.D. 64) Tacitus would have been somewhere around six years old at time, but he doesn't use his own memories of the event (assuming he had some); instead he draws on earlier histories. It's a vivid moment in the book. Tacitus doubts Nero was responsible for the fire, but notes the rumors of Nero's guilt spring up almost immediately. The persecution of the Christians after the fire--Tacitus is our earliest source for this--he attributes to Nero's need to find a scapegoat to stifle those rumors.

The other thing that struck me (though irrelevant to Quo Vadis) was how important Armenia was in Roman thinking at the time. It was an ally, practically a client state, stuck on Rome's eastern border, wedged between Rome and the Arsacid-ruled empire of Parthia (corresponding roughly to modern Iran) who were a major rival to Rome at the time. Quite a lot of energy is devoted to keeping a friendly king in Armenia.

Tacitus is a famously difficult author in Latin. The (small) amount of his Latin I read in grad school impressed me; his tricky sentences frequently end with a sharp ironic sting in their tail. He reminded me of George Eliot, though of course the lines of influence run the other way, and I'm quite sure George Eliot knew her Tacitus perfectly well. The Church and Broadribb translation is fine, but it doesn't capture what I remember of the magic of Tacitus' prose.

Henryk Sienkiewicz' Quo Vadis

And on to the main event...

The handsome soldier Marcus Vinicius meets Callina (also called Lygia) and his knees tremble such as they never did in battle; the beautiful Lygia blushes bright pink and scampers off without a word out of Marcus' presence. "Ah, ha!" says the trained literary mind. "What we have here is Romantic Comedy!"

In romantic comedy the Question is what keeps our lovers apart and what it takes to get them together again in the end. Well, in Nero's Rome, there are plenty of things to keep them apart, maybe, just possibly, too many...

Not least is the fact that Lygia is a secret Christian. Years before she had been handed over to the Romans as a hostage and guarantee of a treaty between the Lygii and the Iazyges. The Romans were a neutral party in that conflict. But Lygia's father dies in battle and her mother dies as well, so Lygia, though an official state hostage, is more or less forgotten, raised by a nice Roman couple of the senatorial class.

Lygia is dark-haired with blue eyes and is so good-looking everyone is worried when she's in a room with Nero for a couple of hours he will fall into uncontrollable lust. Ah, but Petronius has a plan for that. (I suspected, and later verified, that the Lygii inhabited what is now Poland. A little Polish boosterism on the part of our author.) What Petronius didn't take into account was that the equally good-looking Marcus would attract the eye of Poppaea, the empress. Complications ensue.

This lightness doesn't last, though. (Well, the subtitle does say it's a narrative of the time of Nero.) The great fire and the persecution of the Christians are yet to come. For the purposes of the novel Sienkiewicz always assumes of the worst of Nero. Every time when Tacitus says some historians say this and some say that, Sienkiewicz always chooses the darker that, even when Tacitus says the milder this is likely true. For instance, the fire is started at the instigation of Nero, and, according to Sienkiewicz, he really does fiddle (or at least play a lyre) while Rome burns.

If it's not already clear, I preferred the earlier, lighter part of the novel. There were even some of those insider-y Roman jokes. When Petronius says of something it involves more fish than even Apicius ate in his life, I laughed. But it helps to know Apicius was the author of a cookbook. Petronius also snarks about Lucan's skill as a poet.

Later I felt it descended a bit into religious tract. The Christians (which include Peter and Paul) are all annoyingly noble, with the partial exception of Crispus, a fire and brimstone type who gets the occasional reprimand. Saint Paul asks Petronius (and we're reminded of it a second time), "If Caesar [Nero] were a Christian, would ye not all feel safer?" I'm afraid I wouldn't, and, alas, I don't think the question was meant ironically. The torture scenes began to feel a little voyeuristic. I was also a bit alarmed by Sienkiewicz' handling of Poppaea's purported Judaism. Josephus, the Jewish historian, is the source for this, and he meant it as a compliment. It doesn't come across that way in the novel.

Still, the later part has more portraits of well-known people and more big events. Not just Peter and Paul and Petronius. Nero and Poppaea do make good villains, even if their villainy is a bit played up. Seneca and Lucan have small roles. The danger and drama do pick up.

And as for our lovers? Well, you'll just have to read it and see... (if you haven't already.)

Antonine Propaganda

There's an exhibit on currently about Nero at the British Museum. I won't get to see it, but I did read the recent New Yorker article... It reminds us it's the winners who get to write the history. Tacitus, the most balanced of the surviving historians covering the period still clearly hates the Julio-Claudian emperors (that sequence of emperors who were descended somehow from Julius Caesar. Nero was the last.) Suetonius makes no pretence of balance. Both Tacitus and Suetonius flourished under the Flavian and then even more under the Antonine emperors, dynasties that were happy to have the previous guys slandered. It's just possible Nero wasn't quite *so* bad. Augustus had Maecenas, his PR guy, and consequently got pretty good press. The rest of the Julio-Claudians not so much. It doesn't necessarily matter for a novel, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Bit of a rainy week at the Internet-Free Zone so lots of reading. But there was a moment of sun when we caught this guy catching some rays...

Independent People

 "The chief point and the point to which I have always directed my course, is independence. And a man is independent if the hut he lives in is his own." [65]

That's Bjartur of Summerhouses speaking, the protagonist of Halldór Laxness' Independent People, and the most independent of the lot. After eighteen years of indentured servitude, he owns his own croft and flock of sheep. 

You learn what it's like to live in a thatched roof croft in a remote valley far from Reykjavík. It's around the year 1900. It's not pleasant. Cooped up all winter with wormy sheep, a leaky roof, and a fire that smokes. This is realism.

But it also connects to a more mythic era in Iceland's history. Bjartur composes poetry in the old style; I think it's supposed to be pretty good in Icelandic. People do actually believe in elves and trolls. The land Bjartur's house is on is supposedly cursed by Saint Columba (Columcille in Irish) who has been re-branded by the locals as the demon Kolumkilli. Bjartur sneers at this as mere superstition, but isn't entirely able himself to disbelieve.

The Fell King (a neighbor, always referred to as the Fell King, and at this time Bjartur's father-in-law) goes on after Bjartur makes his declaration:

"The love of freedom and independence has always been a characteristic of the Icelandic people. Iceland was originally colonized by freeborn chieftains who would rather live and die in isolation than serve a foreign king. They were the same sort of men as Bjartur."

Ah, Bjartur, the iconic Icelander. But then the Fell King goes on to ask his daughter Rosa, Bjartur's wife, how she likes life in the croft.

"'Oh, it's very free, of course,' she replied, and sniffed." [66]

So, the book is grim, mythic, and often laugh-out loud funny. 

Rosa dies in childbirth, but the daughter survives. Bjartur names her Asta Sollilja, ('beloved sun lily') a rather exotic name. She's the beginning of a considerable amount of flower imagery.

Some years pass, and Bjartur has remarried. Now in addition to Asta Sollilja, he has three sons who have survived their infant years, Helgi, Gvendur, and Nonni. His second wife's mother also lives with them. There's some comic business with a cow--Bjartur is very much a sheep man--whom the local grandee tries to give to Bjartur. Bjartur insists on paying for the cow, though he can't really afford it. (There's also backstory here between Bjartur and the grandee.) Briefly life looks up with the cow, but then an especially bad winter comes that nearly wipes out Bjartur (and does wipe out some of the family.)

The co-op movement comes to Iceland; Bjartur remains loyal to the merchant from whom he buys goods and to whom he sells sheep. The co-op movement is much celebrated in Denmark; it's a bit more ambiguous in the novel. Eventually World War I comes and in Iceland, which remained neutral, it's suddenly boom times.

Bjartur: "Oh, let them squabble, damn them. I only hope they keep it up as long as they can. They aren't half so particular about what they eat now that they're face to face with the realities of life. They'll eat anything now. They'll buy anything from you. Prices are soaring everywhere. Soon they'll be buying muck from your middens." [374]

Not the usual view on the first World War, but not necessarily wrong for that...

Bjartur is stubborn and sure of himself. How good a man is he? He does real damage. Both his wives die young, and while the poverty is so great that high mortality is unsurprising, Bjartur bears some responsibility. "You've always been a cross-grained swine," someone tells him at some point, and it's true. 

He meets with triumph and disaster, and mostly treats those two impostors just the same, but not entirely. His opinions get him and others into trouble, but if he'd stuck to his opinions (especially on debt) just a little more, he might have been better off. But it's also the case that forces outside of his control, that are too big for an independent person, dominate his life. Well, the novel did come out in two parts in the 30s. Maybe it was important to gang together to deal with tough times. The fates of Bjartur's three sons suggest the possibilities of rural Icelandic crofters at the time.

The reprint edition has an introduction by Brad Leithauser, which is interesting and informative. Leithauser met the author late in Laxness' life--Laxness was already starting to suffer from the Alzheimer's that would eventually do him in:

"When I spoke of my admiration for Bjartur, a look of perplexity gave way to one of alarm. 'Oh, but he's so stupid!' he [Laxness] objected.

'Oh, but he's so wonderfully stupid!" I replied, and the old man peered at me and pondered darkly a moment; then his features cleared and he abruptly laughed with pleasure."

That does give a good sense. But on the whole the introduction gives away too much. It's not especially a plot-driven novel, but there is one half-hidden mystery that is gradually revealed over the first third of the novel, and it's not until near the end that we fully understand what Bjartur knows. Leithauser spills the beans. Save the introduction for an afterword. 

Summerbooks: Death by knitting needle

We had some friends over last night for drinks and snacks--and mosquitoes. A couple of them were knitters. I couldn't contribute much to that part of the conversation except to say that, in the last two mysteries I read, the murder weapon was a knitting needle...

Patricia Moyes/Night Ferry To Death (1985)

Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard and his wife Emmy are able to slip away for a quick vacation to the Netherlands. They see the tulips, visit friends, have a nice dinner out. The last day of their vacation, there's a robbery at one of the major diamond dealers in Amsterdam.

But that's not Henry's concern, right?

Ha. On the ferry back one of the passengers is stabbed in a sleeping cabin with a knitting needle. The body is only discovered as the ship is docking in Harwich. The sleeping cabin requires a special ticket to enter and the purser said no one went in or out all night. So there's a limited number of suspects, though that includes Henry and Emmy.

But where is the knitting needle? And where are the diamonds? (Because of course they're involved.) 

There's a few more bodies along the way before Henry solves this one, and it includes another trip to the Netherlands to meet with the diamond merchant.

Pretty fun. But if I was Emmy Tibbett, I'd be terrified to go on vacation. A bunch of Patricia Moyes' mysteries begin when Henry and Emmy are traveling. 

Ngaio Marsh/Swing, Brother, Swing (1949)

This one starts with an amusing epistolary section to give us the exposition: Félicité has fallen in love with Carlos, an Argentine accordion player in a swing band. Her mother disapproves. Her stepfather, the eccentric Lord Pastern and Baggott is indifferent to the potential marriage; he just wants to sit in with the band. So Félicité's cousin Carlisle is summoned in an attempt to talk some sense into her. Another cousin Edward Manx, plus various swing band members are on the scene as well. Various romance possibilities are in the offing.

Lord P&B's musical debut occurs in a club. They've planned some stage business where our lordship will shoot Carlos in the middle of his hot solo. The gun is supposed to be loaded with blanks...but you know how that goes.

Or maybe you don't, because instead of an actual bullet replacing one of the blanks, the murderer has rigged up a projectile involving a knitting needle. Lord P&B duly kills Carlos, but did he mean to? Or did some other murderer tamper with the gun?

And, as it turned out, Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard and his wife Troy had hoped to slip away for a simple night out at a jazz club...

Alleyn, after the usual banter with Br'er Fox, his assistant, solves this. Of course. Still not sure why the gun was stuffed with a knitting needle rather than just putting a bullet back into it. 

Marsh is knowledgeable about and sympathetic toward performers, and is again here, though her life was more involved with theater than music. But her attitude toward the upper classes sometimes brings out the Marxist in me, and halfway through I was half-hoping one of the aristos had done it. But you can't always get what you want...

One of the last night's knitters asked, so were the murderers women? Now that would be telling...

The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić

 

"...this is not a building like any other, but one of those erected by God's will and for God's love; a certain time and certain men built it, and another time and other men will destroy it." [208]

The Bridge on the Drina is a novel about the Mehmed Pasha Sokolović bridge in Višegrad, Bosnia. The novel begins with the bridge's construction, starting in 1571, and relates its history from then until 1914, at the start of the first World War. The introduction, by William H. McNeill, says that there are over 200 characters in the novel (in just over 300 pages) but suggests, and I agree, that the real protagonist of the novel is the bridge itself. 

Mehmed Pasha Sokolovič, who funded the bridge, was born in the area, but was abducted as a child and forcibly converted to Islam for service under Ottoman Sultans. But he was good at it, eventually rising to become the Grand Vizier of the empire. He remembered his homeland, funded the building of the bridge, and left estates to pay for its upkeep. In the middle of the bridge there's a wide place, the kapia, with an engraved dedication, which you can sort of make out in the picture.

It's the novel that, more or less, won Andrić the Nobel Prize of 1961; they declared it an epic, but Andrić himself demurred; he said it was instead a chronicle, which is a pretty good description. But not one line per year as in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, but one with stories. Families and roles recur: the local Orthodox priest, the town rabbi, the administrator of the bridge's trust fund. 

Bosnia is of course a country with a dark and troubled history, and Andrić doesn't let you forget that, but he does allow for the possibility of good, and the bridge is its symbol:

"Even the least of the townsmen felt as if his powers were suddenly multiplied, as if some wonderful, superhuman exploit was brought within the measure of his powers and with the limits of everyday life, as if besides the well-known elements of earth, water, and sky, one more were open to him, as if by some beneficent effort each one of them could suddenly realize one of his dearest desires, that ancient dream of man--to go over the water and to be master of space." [66]

This is at the completion of the bridge, in 1577. But even to get there, a symbolic three lives were lost: Radisav, a Serbian Orthodox, tries to sabotage the construction, is caught, tortured and executed. The master mason's assistant, an Arab, dies in an industrial accident. And an unnamed gypsy child dies from eating too much halva at the party for the opening of the bridge. 

The life of the town centers around the bridge and in particular, that kapia, where hawkers sell food, where the townsfolk gather to talk, where boys meet girls.  One of the best stories is of Fata Avdagina:

"It has always been the case with us that at least one girl in every generation passes into legend and song because of her beauty, her qualities and her nobility." [104]

The story is alluded to in the summary on the back, though I don't think the summarist got it quite right. 😉  But according to the back cover she died from an unhappy marriage.

"For some time the townspeople talked about the incident and then began to forget it. All that remained was a song about a girl whose beauty and wisdom shone above the world as if it were immortal." [112]

The song of Fata Avdagina is sung on later occasions in the book. 

Wars and floods challenge the bridge. The bridge laughs off the floods, despite the occasional dire prediction. The town doesn't always. 

Wars are more problematic. The estates whose income funded the bridge maintenance were in Hungary, and when the Ottomans are forced to retreat from Hungary, that money dries up. The bridge was built with an associated caravanserai; with no money to maintain it, the caravanserai falls apart. 

Višegrad is near the Serbian border, and the various rebellions and wars that led to Serbian independence in 1878 trouble Višegrad as well and the bridge, a chokepoint, is used for the control of people's movement. The kapia is converted into a bunkhouse or a customs check.

That same Treaty of Berlin that formalized Serbian independence resulted in the transfer of Bosnia to the Austro-Hungarians. Financially this marks a major step up for Višegrad, and immigrants from elsewhere in Austria-Hungary start to arrive, Ashkenazi Jews (the town's Jews before were Sephardic), Croats, Italians. New businesses are established, though this includes a whorehouse.

But the frontier with Serbia remains just as troubled. The renowned Serbian rebel Jakov crosses the bridge while Fedun, an Austro-Hungarian soldier from the Ukraine is on duty. He's detained pending his court martial, but Fedun commits suicide before that happens. "Thus the young man who had made his mistake on the kapia remained for ever in the town." [169]

The years leading up to World War I are particularly poignant and interesting. These are times of Andrić's own youth, and he captures well the discussions that must have been taking place at the time.

"It is now 1914, the last year in the chronicle of the bridge on the Drina." [265]

Serb artillery is able to shell the town, and the bridge is partly blown up to prevent Serb armies from advancing. Another time and other men destroyed it. The bridge was restored after World War I (and after the novel ends), but was damaged even more in World War II, only to be restored again.

Ivo Andrić himself was an interesting figure. A Catholic, which to current thinking would make him a Croat, he saw himself as a Yugoslav and, at least in his later years, disliked the divisions between the various ethnic strands in Yugoslavia and refused to identify as a Croat. Certainly the happiest moments in the novel are when the various ethnic and religious groups in the city are able to live together in peace:

"'They are as close as the priest and the hodja'; and this saying became a proverb with them." [129]

And the priest and the hodja (a Muslim cleric) were especially close at that time. I was also amused when the town rabbi was given the title Hajji (one who has performed the haj or the pilgrimage to Mecca) as a title of respect. 

Ivo Andrić was born in 1892 in Sarajevo. His father died when he was two; his mother was impoverished and felt unable to raise him by herself, so he was given over to his mother's sister and her husband in Višegrad. Andrić felt these were his happiest years. He returned to Sarajevo when he got a scholarship for his studies. He was a friend of Gavrilo Princip, Franz Ferdinand's assassin, and a member of the same secret society as Princip; he seems to have known nothing about the assassination in advance, nevertheless he was arrested by the Austro-Hungarians, imprisoned first in a prison and then later house arrest before being granted clemency in 1917. After the war he earned a Ph.D. (at Graz) and joined the new kingdom of Yugoslavia's diplomatic service, serving in various posts before ending up as the ambassador to Nazi Germany just as Yugoslavia was invaded by Germany. In occupied Yugoslavia he lived in retirement, wrote three novels (including this one) which were only published at the end of the war. He held a few ceremonial posts in Tito's Yugoslavia, but mostly wrote. 

And in 1961 he won the Nobel prize. 

Very highly recommended. Maybe he was one of those who actually deserved the Nobel prize...

Since I was just reading about guslars recently in Kanigel's biography of Milman Parry, I was amused to see this:

"From the deep pocket of his cloak the Montenegrin drew out a gusle, a tiny primitive fiddle, clumsy and small as the palm of a man's hand, and a short bow." [33]

A second guslar shows up later as well.

I was intending a different Andrić novel for my twenty books of summer list, but this one crept in first. I might still read Omar Pasha Latas, though. It also covers Bosnia for my European reading tour this year.

No Other Life (#BrianMooreAt100)

 "'There is no other life,' my mother said."

Fr. Paul Michel is a priest, an Albanesian, who has spent his career teaching at an elite school in Ganae, an island in the Caribbean. He's about to retire and return to his country of birth, Canada, where he no longer has any particular connection. The novel is a reminiscence about the one important event, the one important person, in his life. 

Early in his teaching career the school established, reluctantly, a few scholarships for the impoverished, who are generally blacker than the elite, and one of the students they took in, on Fr. Michel's recommendation, was the orphaned Jean-Paul Cantave. Cantave becomes Fr. Michel's boy, his Petit. Cantave is a brilliant student, who goes on to become a priest and join the Albanesian order, studying in Europe, and finally returning to Ganae to help his native land. 

And become its president. 

It's still the era of liberation theology, though just barely. John Paul II is pope, and the future Benedict XVI is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, and they have little brief for left-wing priests in politics. 

There are no Albanesians, there is no Ganae, and--it is a novel--there is no Jean-Paul Cantave. But the Albanesians are more or the less the Salesians, Ganae is more or less Haiti, and Cantave is more or less, though probably less, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 

Well. Aristide's own story is not yet ended. No Other Life came out in 1993, so Moore couldn't know its complexities, but he clearly has some understanding what they might be like. Aristide had been elected president of Haiti in March of 1991 and turfed in a coup later that year. Cantave faces a coup as well. Is Cantave a good man? What does it mean for a priest to be a good man in a dire political world? Dedicated to this world or the next? Fr. Michel's mother had encouraged him to become a priest, but on her deathbed has a crisis of faith, and declares to her priest/son there is no other life. But does Fr. Michel believe that? His own faith doesn't seem to be rock-solid. The ending gives a hint of the conclusion Fr. Michel came to, but remains ambiguous.

I thought this was very good. Like The Colour of Blood that I read earlier this year, it's a novel of a man of faith facing a difficult political situation and wondering what to do.

It just so happened that I was reading about the Plain Style in an entirely different book (Timothy Steele's introduction to The Poems of J. V. Cunningham). Moore is the absolute master of a spare, pared-down style. Steele quotes Cicero (from Orator):

"He follows the ordinary usage, really differing more than is supposed from those who are not eloquent at all. Consequently the audience, even if they are no speakers themselves, are sure they can speak in that fashion. For that plainness of style (orationis subtilitas) seems easy to imitate at first thought, but when attempted nothing is more difficult."

This could equally have applied to Moore. But it makes him difficult to quote, because it all looks so danged ordinary.

I admit to having found Moore uneven in the past, and until this year I thought his best books were about terribly sad lives of poverty and limited scope (Judith Hearne, Ginger Coffey) and so difficult to read for their subject. But The Colour of Blood and No Other Life make it clear he's got another very sharp arrow in his quiver.

It would be Brian Moore's 100th birthday this year. Cathy at 746books is hosting a readalong.

The Betrothed

 "This is not just a book, it offers consolation to the whole of humanity."

It's not every novel that gets that as its blurb, and then to have it written by Verdi...but such is Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed.

It's 1628, and Renzo and Lucia think it's their wedding day. But their parish priest tells them he can't, he won't, marry them that day, with patently thin excuses, finally claiming he's too sick to do it. But it's Don Rodrigo, the local grandee, that's threatened our pastor, on the pain of death, against solemnifying the marriage.

All because Don Rodrigo saw the beautiful Lucia in the village, and made a bet with his cousin, he would have that girl.

It's not giving much away to say that, after a whole heap of troubles, and a chunkster's worth of pages, Renzo and Lucia are, in fact, married, and look to live happily ever after.

But, oh, those troubles. Don Rodrigo's enmity is only the start. Renzo and Lucia live in a village close to Milan, which, at that time, is under the sway of Spain. Don Rodrigo's goons lead a night-time raid on Lucia's house in order to kidnap her; she escapes by luck. But Renzo and Lucia have to flee their village and so get caught up in the general troubles of the era. Which include war and the plague, both by-blows of the Thirty Years' War.

The first edition of Manzoni's novel comes out in 1827; he revised it and the fuller second edition came out in 1842. So it's a historical novel, and Manzoni, like everyone else, has been reading Sir Walter Scott: he's got Scott's antiquarian interests, and his mock scholarship.

But he's also interested in the Catholic church, the religious life, and in redemption; the novel's main historical figure is Federico Borromeo, the cardinal of Milan, and younger cousin of Saint Carlo Borromeo. The Cardinal is a genuinely good man, who leads others to goodness. But it's also made clear that not everyone is meant for the religious life, and one extended episode involves Gertrude, of a wealthy family, and educated by nuns. But her parents railroad her into a nunnery afterwards, because they're too cheap to provide a proper dowry.

Manzoni has clearly done a bunch of research on the plague and I wrote out a bunch of parallels with our current situation--lockdowns that come too late, denial that anything is happening, contact tracing, and socializing only in the open air. But perhaps we're all tired of thinking about pandemics...

All in all, a pretty fun story. Sometimes the good were a little too good, and the evil a little too evil, though. There's a recent review at Mudpuddlesoup as well.

"There's justice in this world, in the long run."

A Note on Translations

The novel has been translated twice in recent-ish times, by Archibald Colquhon in 1951, and by Bruce Penman in 1972. The Penman is what Penguin has on offer and is easy enough to come by; the Colquhon was last reprinted in Everyman's Library in 2013, and seems to have gone out of print since. I started with the Penman--and the Other Reader read the Penman all the way through without complaints--but, while I was enjoying the story, I got annoyed with the translation and decided to switch. Here's an example. The situation (from Chapter 9) has our future nun Gertrude stuck at home; with her parents deliberately ignoring her. Here's the sentence from Penman that did me in: 😉

"But she could not help noticing that one of the pages, very different from the rest of them, showed a respect and sympathy that had something special about them."

Argh! 'Them' twice in the sentence, both (of them!) not really necessary, and with different referents. After I finally parsed it and realized the second use of 'them' didn't mean the pages, I started Googling other translations. There's an anonymous 1845 translation available at Internet Archive, but unfortunately it's not at Gutenberg:

"She could not, however, but observe that one of the servants, a page, appeared to bear her a respect very different to the others, and to feel a peculiar kind of compassion for her."

Much clearer, though maybe a little old-fashioned. Here's what Colquhon does:

"She could not fail to notice, however, that a page, in striking contrast to the rest, treated her with respect, and showed a particular compassion towards her."

Not brilliant, but better. The Italian (from Gutenberg):

"Dovette però accorgersi che un paggio, ben diverso da coloro, le portava un rispetto, e sentiva per lei una compassione d'un genere particolare."

The Italian is the most compact and strikes me as the best (unsurprisingly, I suppose). I have some Italian but if I read a seven-hundred page book in Italian, it would have been the one book of summer instead of the twenty, I'm afraid...

The Black Arrow

I had four blak arrows under my belt,
Four for the griefs that I have felt,
Four for the number of ill menne
That have oppressid me now and then.

It seems to be Stevenson week here at Typings.

The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses is a boys' adventure set during the War of the Roses. It was serialized in Young Folks in 1883, after Stevenson's Treasure Island and before Kidnapped, a good period for Stevenson. This one was a great success as a serial, but since then has never been as popular. Is it less good than those? Hmm, maybe, but still it's an awful lot of fun.

Young Dick Shelton is the ward of Sir Daniel Brackley. Henry VI is king--for now--just recovered from one of his periodic fits of madness. A black arrow fells Dick Appleyard, an archer in the service of Sir Daniel and the threatening poem I quoted above is attached. Sir Daniel is named as another of the oppressors; one of the griefs is the death of Henry Shelton, Dick's father. What does all this mean for young Shelton?

At first he's loyal enough to Sir Daniel, who does look after him. Sir Daniel's a competent military leader, good with his troops and decisive in battle, but he's also intemperate--well, who isn't in 1460?--greedy and more attentive to his own interests than those of England.

A battle is brewing between Lancastrians and Yorkists. The partisans of the Black Arrow are stalking the countryside. Sir Daniel has captured John Matcham--well, we quickly learn that John is really Joanna, a rich heiress. She escapes, runs into young Shelton traveling cross-country with a message. He still sees her as John. They fight, become friends; he saves her; she saves him (he can't swim). It's not giving much away to say you know how this one goes.

That's all in the first fifty pages. But I think I'll stop there with plot summary. To carry on would be put me in competition with Stevenson in telling a story, not a good place to be. It is a rollicking good yarn, with lots of adventure.

Historical fiction requires a few famous individuals to show up: this one has Richard Crookback, that is, Richard of Gloucester, Richard III to be. Stevenson admits to fudging his dates; Richard should be about eight when the novel takes place, but here he's a young, but effective, soldier-captain. It's a good portrait, and well, dates, shmates. Catesby also makes an appearance. I know him less from the actual historical record than from his turn in Shakespeare. I suspect that's probably true of Stevenson, too, though Wikipedia says Stevenson did read the Paston Letters for background.

Anyway, like I said, rollicking. Perhaps the occasional archaizing in the language has put people off? 

"Ye be mortal small made, master," said Hugh, with a wide grin; "something o' the wrong model, belike."

Hugh is talking to John/Joanna. He clearly sees through her disguise, even if young Shelton doesn't. Anyway, there are passages like that. This sort of thing doesn't bother me, maybe even sets the mood. But this was the first book in my complete Stevenson--which I have read about half of--that I had to cut the pages.

The novel is dedicated to his wife, which they both thought a great joke, since it was the one she wouldn't read. She had no tolerance, it seems, for tales of knights in armor.

The Other Reader's knight is a bit grizzled for young Shelton, but since Shelton fights with a crossbow for half the novel, there he is on top of the volume. 

The first of my books of summer, and one actually from the list!