2019 European Reading Challenge Wrapup

It's been quite the European tour this year, but it's time to acknowledge it's over...I didn't go quite as over-the-top as I did last year, but I still passed the Five Star level and then some, for a final total of twelve countries. Still I wonder more at the ones I missed. (What? Nothing from Russia this year?)

Here's my final list:

1.) Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday. Austria.
2.) Robert Gerwarth's The Vanquished: Why The First World War Failed To End. Latvia.
3.) Boreslav Pekic' Houses. Serbia.
4.) Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Italy.
5.) Endre Farkas' Never, Again. Hungary.
6.) Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad. Poland.
7.) Eric Ambler's The Light of Day. Turkey.
8.) Mircea Cartarescu's Blinding. Romania.
9.) Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. France.
10.) Hannah Arendt's Men in Dark Times. Germany
11.) George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life. UK.
12.) Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Monaco.

Thanks to Gilion for hosting and looking forward to the new edition!

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth

There have been a lot of wonderful posts about The House of Mirth (thank you, Cleo, Fanda, Marian, --that I know of!) as well as discussion at Cleo's site. Reading the novel and the discussion got me to wonder about tragedy, so that's going to be my organizing principle...

I had always planned on reading it as a tragedy; I put it on my list for Karen's Back to the Classics challenge as this year's tragedy, and I knew (without knowing much about it) it didn't end well. And it doesn't. But is it tragedy? I say yes, but I do think it's a bit tricky and unexpected in that regard.

Lily Bart, our tragic heroine, doesn't always make good choices; often she can't seem to decide what it is she wants; and sometimes she makes outright poor choices. Now if bad things happen to a person who makes bad choices, does that count as tragedy? Or is it simply just desserts?

Think about some of the classics of tragedy: when we first meet Oedipus, he's determined to find out what's causing the plague in Thebes, no matter the cost, no matter who's the guilty party. (Plagues generally had a guilty party back then, not a guilty bacterium.) It's his determination--a good quality--and his history that bring about his downfall. Or Pentheus, of The Bacchae, who declares that running around, naked and drunk, on a hillside at night is not a good thing. Reasonable, right? Well, no, as it turns out.

Also these men are significant figures--both kings--and most tragedies concern themselves with significant figures. Even women in classical tragedies are princesses or queens: such as Antigone or Phaedra.

But Hamlet is largely a tragedy of someone who can't make up his mind: if he'd just gone off and killed his stepfather at the start--that stepfather who was guilty of murder--wouldn't everything have turned out much better for him? But he can't make up his mind to do it. And Lily Bart can't make up her mind whom to marry, but she really needs to marry somebody.

OK, a quick plot summary: (skip if you prefer not to know.)

**Plot summary**

Lily Bart is in her late 20s at the start of the novel, and when we first see her she's considering marrying Percy Gryce. She's orphaned and is dependent financially on the dubious kindness of relations. She goes to visit her old friend, Lawrence Selden, whom she pumps for a few salient facts about Americana, Percy Gryce's hobby. She and Selden have a somewhat flirtatious conversation so we know there's something more than friendship there. As she's leaving Selden's bachelor apartment (a no no!) she's seen by Simon Rosedale, a rising Jewish businessman.

But when she meets Percy Gryce at a friend's country estate, she sabotages her chances to marry him by associating with Selden and ignoring Gryce. (She doesn't go to church! The horror!) She gambles, out of boredom, and ends up owing money, word of which gets back to Gryce. She blows her chance by not concentrating.

After her gambling debts and other expenses she needs money, which she accepts from Guy Trenor, a wealthy married man. Ostensibly this is coming out of investments he makes for her, which Trenor is able to put into a 'sure thing,' but we suspect he's just giving her the money.

In subsequent conversations with Lawrence Selden, we learn he might marry her, but his freedom is important to him and he wants to know that she's willing to live on what he makes--he's a lawyer, and presumably middle class, but certainly not rich--and she pushes him off. She can't commit to a life, as she sees it, of impoverishment.

She discovers Guy Trenor wants more than just a handshake in return for the 'investments' he made for her. She also discovers that everyone else assumes that the idea of 'investment' is just a fig-leaf covering up that he's giving her money. She decides she has to pay him back.

Rosedale proposes marriage. He's certainly rich enough, and in some ways he seems a pretty kindly man. Lily sees him with children, and he's good with them. But she can't get past her feeling that he's outside her circle, that he's crude. But she's feeling particularly pinched by the money she needs to return to Trenor, and so she almost says yes, but can't decide to.

At just this moment, her friend, and I use that word advisedly, Bertha Dorset invites Lily to go sailing in the Mediterranean. Bertha is bringing along both her husband George and her lover Ned. Lily is there as a distraction, though she may not entirely recognize this. In a shocking scene, when things are at their worst between the Dorsets, Bertha, to cover up her own sins, effectively accuses Lily of having an affair with her husband. Society buys Bertha's version, and Lily is ostracized.

The Dorset marriage is clearly on the rocks, and friends suggest Lily could snag George. George is drawn to Lily, and he's wealthy, but he's also a bit pathetic, and can Lily really marry the divorced husband of her 'friend'? (Though Bertha is no friend to her.) She can't make up her mind to do it.

Rosedale is still willing to marry her, but now she would need to silence Bertha Dorset because Rosedale is determined to break into society. She has the means, letters suitable for blackmailing Bertha, but does she have the will? No, it would seem.

There were two other possibilities than marriage presented for Lily, though Lily certainly sees her life as leading to marriage. Her cousin Gertie Farish lives modestly on a small inheritance and spends her time in good works. Lily fleetingly helps Gertie with this, but I wasn't convinced this was more than a momentary pleasure for Lily, that it was something she really wanted. In any case the inheritance she might have expected was lost when her aunt got (partially incorrect) word of Lily's bad behavior.

Also Lily could work, and she does a bit at the end, but really has no skills; she wasn't raised to it. She can manage a little light decorative sewing, but when it comes to toiling in a sweatshop, she can't keep up.

She realizes she's falling out of life, and has bad dreams, and takes chloral hydrate to sleep. A pharmacist warns her it's easy to accidentally overdose, and well...you did know it was going to end badly, didn't you?

**End of plot summary**

So Lily has four marriage possibilities within the frame of the novel, and it's implied there were others earlier. Percy? Boring and a prude. Lawrence? Insufficiently rich and too committed to his own freedom. George? Pathetic, a divorcé, and you should never marry somebody on the rebound. Simon? A social outsider too stuck on breaking in. All are flawed, though maybe not impossibly, but she can't commit to either of her non-marrying prospects--working or a quiet poverty--either.

So is it a tragedy? Well, what are our characteristics? She's not a queen or a princess. But her great beauty gives her significance sufficient for tragedy. When she's run off to Gertie's apartment in despair and falls asleep there, we see Gerty's thoughts in looking on her: "To look on that prone loveliness was to see in it a natural force, to recognize that love and power belong to such as Lily,..." (Book I, Chapter 14.) This comes partly from Gerty's own despair, but it is also the general feeling about Lily. Rosedale says something similar: (Book II, Chapter 11)

Lily continued to meet his expostulations with a smile. 'I don't know why I should regard myself as an exception--' she began. 

'Because you are; that's why;...'

There is something special about Lily. And so, when something bad happens to her, it's at least potentially tragic.

Lily's great beauty gives her fate the necessary magnitude, I'd say. What then of her own actions? Are they simply self-destructive? Well, as I mentioned, Hamlet's is also a tragedy of somebody who can't make up his mind. Hamlet's doubts are more intellectual--he needs proof, definitive proof, in order to act--while Lily's are moral, born partly, it's true, out of a certain fastidiousness. But twice she makes a definite moral choice (to pay back Trenor, and to finally burn Bertha's letters) and both are admirable; both also materially hasten her decline. She doesn't dither quite as much as Hamlet. She hasn't got Oedipus' or Antigone's stubborn determination, but when she has a good choice to make, she can make it and does, even if those choices bring her closer to the end.

And what other choices did she really have? We discussed whom she should have married, but really were any of them satisfactory? For myself I felt Selden was the best of the lot, but Lily made the decision not to marry Selden because she knew herself and knew she could not live on his income; that was admirable in its way; Undine Spragg made the opposite choice vis-a-vis Ralph Marvell in The Custom of the Country, and that was the destruction of Marvell. Moreover, Selden all too readily jumps to the wrong conclusion about Lily when he sees her with Trenor; how well did he really know Lily as a person? Or was she just a thing (albeit a thing of beauty) to him?

The other marriage choices seem even more doubtful. Rosedale seemed possible for a bit, but his insistence that Lily use Bertha's letters to silence Bertha made him considerably less sympathetic to me.

Could she have become like Gertie Farish? That seems the most admirable path, but Gertie was pining for Selden, and doesn't seem completely happy herself.

Lily's exasperating: but tragic heroes can be exasperating; Ismene tells her sister Antigone as much in Sophocles' play. The real question is, given who she was, could she have done something different? Are the choices she made the only right and possible ones? I think Wharton has constructed this cleverly so that we do feel a sort of tragic horror as Lily's options are compressed from few to none, and that those choices she does make, when she does realize what's happening, are both right and also deadly.

Anyhoo, in the end I talked myself into this. But sometimes I just wanted to take Lily and shake her and say, Look, you're being stupid! What happens to you is no tragedy! But in the end I really did feel the pity and the horror.

Thoughts?

Thanks to Cleo for organizing the readalong. It's been great fun reading everyone's posts.

This was on my Classics Club list, and is the tragic novel I'd always been planning for Karen's Back to the Classics challenge. Even if at moments I doubted it's tragic-ness.

And I wasn't expecting this, but the big scene--in some ways the novel's most important moment--when Bertha Dorset subtly accuses Lily of sleeping with her husband--takes place in Monaco, which means it's a Monaco novel for the European Reading Challenge hosted by Gilion. If you'd asked me would Monaco be on my list for two years running, I'd have laughed. But first there was Rebecca. And now The House of Mirth. Rich people hang out in Monaco, I guess.  I may have to read a biography of Grace Kelly next year just to keep up the streak.

George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life

"Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons and has a sigh for the departed shades of vulgar errors."

Scenes of Clerical Life represents Eliot's first published fiction; its three stories came out in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857; they were collected into the book the following year. She was already reasonably well-known under her real name as an essayist and translator from the German, but the first story was published anonymously before she coined the pseudonym for subsequent publications.

The stories take place in the past, twenty, thirty, sixty years ago. They are either the times of George Eliot's childhood or represent stories of the further past that might have been told in George Eliot's childhood. They're narrated in a first-person voice, but the narrator is not a character in any of the stories, and in at least one is explicitly recalling childhood. They all take place in the same fictional space (closely based on Nuneaton, Wikipedia tells me, where George Eliot grew up) and characters overlap between the stories.

"The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton" is the first of the three stories. Amos Barton is the Vicar of Shepparton, happily married with six beloved children. He's a reasonably good vicar, though no saint. To be sure he holds multiple livings, but has to pay curates to do the work for all except the one, and he doesn't make enough to live on. He loves his wife, but doesn't think much about her. The Bartons get involved in charity toward the fairly dubious Countess Czernacki, and their finances go from bad to worse. George Eliot's ironic tolerance is in fine form and it's the funniest of the stories until, well, it isn't.

The second story is "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story". Mr. Gilfil is just before Amos Barton's time, and the town thinks of him as old and sedate, just a little bit boring, and fortunately given to preaching short sermons. But, as it turns out, that's not the full story.

"Janet's Repentance" is the last and longest of the three stories. The Rev. Tryan comes to town, working among the poor weavers; he wants to start an evening lecture at the church. But the respectable elements of the town accuse Tryan of Methodism or worse; his case is not helped by the support of Mr. Jerome, the town's one well-to-do Dissenter. The lawyer Dempster organizes the opposition to Tryan, with the aid of his wife Janet.

The town admires Dempster as a clever and not overly scrupulous lawyer, but he drinks too much. Janet joins her husband in his campaign to smear Tryan, not so much out of conviction, but as a way to reignite the love between them that had soured since they first married.

I thought this one took a little long to get going and in the beginning there was too much simple picturing of the people of the town, so I'd say it's the weakest; but it does get going and makes a pretty good story as well.

So, are these Middlemarch? Well, no. But even second-rate George Eliot is still awfully good, and it's nice, in a way, to see that she didn't first appear full-grown in armor like Athena from the head of Zeus, but had to work to get better. And did. Gives some hope for the rest of us...

A book from my classics club list

and one for the Karen's Back to the Classics Challenge.

It also means I've only got one volume left to read in that collected Eliot shown above, the volume with the poems, a play (!) and The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Eliot's last work.

The collected George Eliot posts on the blog.

Hannah Arendt's Men In Dark Times

Men in Dark Times is a collection of Hannah Arendt's occasional articles that came out in 1968. The pieces were from the previous fifteen years and cover figures such Karl Jaspers, Pope John XXIII, Walter Benjamin, Hermann Broch, Bertolt Brecht. Despite the title two women are included: Rosa Luxembourg and Isak Dinesen.

Arendt is probably best known for her great book Eichmann in Jerusalem, her controversial report on the trial in 1961 of Adolf Eichmann for his part in the Holocaust. It's the source of the phrase, 'the banality of evil.' She was also a political philosopher and a scholar of totalitarianism.

I pulled this off the shelf to read her essay on Hermann Broch because I was still thinking about The Death of Virgil, but that was actually the least interesting essay in the book: it's the introduction a volume out of the collected essays of Broch, and it was simply too specialized for me.

Some of the other essays are slender: she has some interesting ideas about Dinesen, for instance, but the context was a biography of Dinesen she was reviewing that she didn't think was very good, and that distracted her from the more interesting parts, I thought. Half the essays are translated from German.

But the essays on Benjamin, and particularly on Brecht, were very good. That on Benjamin was from a foreword to the collection of Benjamin essays titled Illuminations, but I thought it would serve as a pretty good introduction to Benjamin, even if you didn't go on to read that particular book. And her essay on Brecht was even better: it was a piece from the New Yorker ten years after Brecht died, and was looking at the state of his reputation at that time, the relationship between his poetry and his politics. Brecht died in a somewhat bad odor; he had been chased out of the United States after World War II for his (never very doctrinaire) communism, and further chased out of West Germany, ending up in East Germany. He was unhappy and unproductive there and most likely afraid in those last years of Stalin. Arendt, the great scholar and opponent of all totalitarianism, sensitively considers the relationship of the work to the political morality of the artist. I wondered to what extent this also reflected her thoughts on Heidegger, who had been her teacher--and lover--in between the world wars, but was later a Nazi supporter.

Recommended particularly for the essay on Brecht.

Margaret Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian

"I fell to making, and then re-making, this portrait of a man almost wise."

I admit to being uncertain about this book until at least halfway through. I mostly kept reading it because it came highly recommended. (This means you, O!) At one point, though, I told The Other Reader (who had read it before we were even a couple, had liked it, but had half forgotten it) that it was like 'a campaign biography. It's just a resumé of all the good things Hadrian had done and wants to do.' I may even have accused Yourcenar of being French, and thus incapable of irony. But I was wrong...

The quote above (from the afterword in my edition, 'Reflections On The Composition') is a bit of a clue. Yourcenar definitely admires Hadrian, but is capable of seeing his limitations. It's actually a fairly subtle portrait.

The work is structured as a letter from Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius, emperor-to-be, and is in her understanding of the voice of Hadrian, and, of course, to Hadrian himself what he does is reasonable and wise. Hadrian dutifully intends to do well by the empire. Now this does lead to statements like:

"I put the finishing touches to the long and complex reorganization of imperial domains in Asia Minor; the peasants were the better off for it, and the State, too."

or, of the reconstruction of a library in Athens:

"Particular attention had been paid to the choice of lamps, and to their placing."

Which makes him sound like a well-intentioned, but micro-managing, Jimmy Carter. And he kind of is.

A bit of background: Hadrian is the middle of the so-called 'Five Good Emperors,' who ruled Rome from 96 AD to 180 AD. After the mad incompetence of Nero and Claudius, and the harsh tyranny of Domitian, this was almost a century of relatively stable and somewhat tolerant rule; Hadrian himself was emperor from 117 to 138 AD. Marcus Aurelius, the recipient of the memoirs, was the last of those five emperors and the adoptive grandson of Hadrian. Hadrian takes over from Trajan, who expanded the empire, and enters into a period of consolidation.

Also Hadrian was almost certainly homosexual or bisexual, and Yourcenar presents him as such.

Now the idea that this is a letter to Marcus Aurelius fades a bit as you go along; well, even in pre-Tweet days, a letter of 300 pages would be a bit improbable. And as the book ends with Hadrian dying, presumably he's not writing a letter at that point. Hadrian starts his discourse mentioning his illness (dropsy or edema) which Hadrian knows will kill him, but then backs up to go through the course of his life. What impact did his childhood in Spain have? The loss of his natural father?  What is his relationship with Trajan, his predecessor and adoptive father? This presents a less secure, but still vigorous Hadrian. Then when he becomes emperor, what are his plans and visions for the state? The two quotes above come from that phase, and are a fair sample of Hadrian in his prime. But later the sick and tired Hadrian comes to the fore, and this was in some ways the most engaging, as Hadrian reckons with what he had done, and what his legacy was likely to be.

My edition has a fifteen page bibliographic note, and it's clear Yourcenar has done her homework. She means for this to be a real representation of Hadrian's inner life as far as we can know it, and, though we can't ever know for sure, I have to say, it really works. Even if that does include a bit of boring, but successful, do-gooding-ness in the middle of his life.

The two main early sources for the life of Hadrian are Dio Cassius, and The Augustan History. I immediately went off and started the latter...

I pulled this off the shelf for Meytal's Women In Translation month, but didn't quite finish it in time, though I've been hacking away at this post for a while now. It covers France--Yourcenar was born in Belgium, but mostly grew up in France, and was the first woman elected to the French Academy--for my Europe reading challenge, hosted at Rose City Reader.

I had a few other ideas for this post, but it's taken me long enough already!

Mircea Cartarescu's Blinding: The Left Wing

"Bucharest, my city, my alter ego"

Blinding: The Left Wing is the first novel of a trilogy by Mircea Cărtărescu. He seems to be an important Romanian poet and novelist, but one ill-served in English, probably unsurprisingly. This came out in Romanian in 1996, and was translated into English by Sean Cotter for Archipelago Books in 2013. The trilogy was completed in Romanian in 2007, the rest hasn't yet appeared in English.

The narrator of the novel is named Mircea and lives in Bucharest; the parents of the novel-Mircea met in 1955; the actual-life-Mircea was born in 1956, in Bucharest. But the novel isn't all that grounded in time; and while it's definitely centred in Bucharest, it isn't entirely grounded in place, either. It flashes back to the narrator's mother's family, the Badislavs, a Romanized family of Bulgarians who relocate to Romania in the 1850s. There are also sections that follow Cedric, a black jazz drummer from New Orleans, who ends up playing a club in Bucharest in the early 40s, and becomes the lover of Mircea's aunt.

It's a novel with surreal/magical/folkloric elements: The migration of the Badislavs involve the ritual sacrificing of the shadow of a young boy, to safely cross a frozen river; we're told earlier generations would have sacrificed the boy. Scenes involving Cedric take place in Louisiana, and involve the ritual exploration of an arch that opens like a vagina. I admit to finding the use of Cedric as symbol dangerously close to offensive, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant that way.

I found the jumping back and forth in time and place a bit difficult, though I do think an actual Romanian reader would pick up on the clues faster than I did, and it may not be so difficult for a Romanian.

There's quite a lot of symbolism involving butterflies. The other two volumes of the trilogy are Blinding: Body and Blinding: The Right Wing, so make of that what you will.

Also the narrator's mother's name is Maria/Mary. A revelation occurs at the end, after that trip into the Louisiana vagina/arch:

It heralds the Gospel for all. There is no other annunciation than a person's birth. And every birth creates a religion, it is an annunciation. And religion itself has no other meaning than birth. It shows us the Way, it reveals the Steps to us. It preaches Happiness. Already our eyes, fallen out of their sockets from such blinding blinding, will see the embryo, the child, wonder, ransom. Black and white, Asian, women, men, and children, we wait, on the edge of the abyss, rejoicing. We take light from light and never die again...

I think this means well, but I'm not entirely sure. What got us here, to this revelation, was impressive, but for me at least, not entirely lucid or convincing. I'm no longer entirely certain what got me interested in this book, and while it's not really my thing, I have the suspicion it's pretty well done. Interesting, at any rate, in the Bucharest sections. A blurb on the back page compares it to Borges, García Marquez, the Brothers Grimm, some others. I'd say no. The best cite from the back of the book is Bruno Schulz. But if I was picking a comparison title, I'd say Witold Gombrowicz.

Covering Romania for the European Reading Challenge, hosted by Rose City Reader.

The story of Arthur Abdel Simpson, or that lying Eric Ambler

How about those book covers? No serious books here!

Dirty Story

I picked up Eric Ambler's Dirty Story (1967) at a charity sale last fall. It's one of the few of Ambler's spy novels I haven't read, and I was happy to find it. It starts in Athens where Arthur Abdel Simpson is a chauffeur, tour guide, and small-time crook. He's got passport trouble, with neither a valid Egyptian passport (his mother's country) nor an English passport (his father's.) The clerk at the English embassy is perfectly well aware of Simpson's criminal record in various countries, and simply refuses to renew his now out of date English passport, claiming his parents were never married. Simpson is left with no choice but to try to buy a fake passport on the docks at Piraeus. For which he doesn't have the money.

His attempt to scheme his way out of this results in various complications that lead to his taking a job as a mercenary in a war between small (fake) African countries over mineral rights.

The exposition was amusing, but took up too much of the novel; the adventure part was compelling and fun, but came a little late in the book, only the last 60 pages.

But it was early in the exposition I realized this was the same protagonist/narrator as in Ambler's The Light of Day, so I pulled that off the shelf.

The Light of Day

The Light of Day (1962) is the much better novel; here Simpson breaks into the hotel room of his client Harper after dropping Harper off at a house of prostitution, and sets himself up to be blackmailed into assisting in some illegal scheme. What is it? Simpson figures it's drugs; the Turkish policeman, Colonel Haki, who detects it almost right away, assumes it's political. The alternate title of the book, Topkapi (also the title of the movie, with Peter Ustinov as Simpson) half gives it away, but I won't say more. Much more thriller, less exposition, with Ambler's signature humor.

I'd read The Light of Day before, a while ago now, and so I didn't realize until I reread it, that Simpson's explanation of his checkered career is almost the same in Dirty Story as it is in The Light of Day. Pretty slack on Ambler's part. It's amusing, but reading them one right after the other is a bit disappointing, but it's the second novel that's the lazy one, of course, not this one.

Here Lies

I've long loved the title of Ambler's autobiography, and when I saw I could get it from the library, I thought, well, now's the time. It dates from 1985, when Ambler was 76, and comes after all of his novels, though he lived on for another thirteen years. It's pretty entertaining.

His parents were puppeteers and performers of musical theater, before his father decided he needed a more stable job during the Depression years. It covers his school years (decent public school education,) his first jobs (manufacturing of electrical equipment--this was full of technical information and often incomprehensible--,) and his war years (mostly with a film unit, writing for Carol Reed or John Huston.) It stops about 1950, but then author biographies often get dull once they're solidly established so maybe that's just as well.

Now I want to see the movie again.

Can't get much more fluffy/summer-y in one's reading than that!

20 Books of Summer

and while I have an unread Orhan Pamuk novel around here, The Light of Day is definitely a Turkey book, so...

European Reading Challenge

The Cyberiad

Well, perhaps it was just another empty invention--there are certainly fables enough in this world. And yet, even if the story isn't true, it does have some grain of sense and instruction to it, and it's entertaining as well, so it's worth the telling.

I pulled Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad off the shelf for the #1965Club, but didn't finish it in time. I read enough of it, though, to make me certain I needed to reread it.

I likely first came across Stanislaw Lem (and Borges and Raymond Smullyan and Thomas Nagel and, and, and...) when I read The Mind's I, (1981) edited by Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. It includes three stories by Lem, including two that come from this book. So, these are stories that give mathematician/philosophers something to talk about, "some grain of sense and instruction." But then they are entertaining, too.

Trurl and Klaupacius are constructors, that is they build intelligent machines to solve various problems. Mostly these are problems that didn't need solving, like Trurl's machine capable of creating everything that begins with the letter N. That makes it sound science-fiction-y, and it is, and quite possibly silly, which it is, too, though in a good way; but these are also fables, as the subtitle says. This may be a universe with robots, but it also has pirates and princesses and (repeatedly) kings who commission something from Trurl and then refuse to pay. So the proud are pulled down and the lowly exalted, generally, except when they ain't...and in any case it makes a good story.

Many of the stories in this are satirical in intent. Stanislaw Lem died at the age of 84 in 2006 in Poland, and so most of his career and, I assume, all of these stories, were written under the former Communist regime. Now I know from other things of Lem's I've read, he's capable of satirizing capitalism with perfect aplomb, but really, were the Polish censors completely asleep? Or did they simply not care about science fiction?

"Revolutionary solutions, on the other hand, boil down to either the Carrot or the Stick. The Stick, or bestowing happiness by force, is found to produce from one to eight hundred times more grief than no interference whatsoever. As for the Carrot, the results--believe it or not--are exactly the same,..."

This from a story in which Klaupacius assists a hermit in hunting down the population with the H. L. P. D., the Highest Level of Possible Development, in order to bestow human (and robotic) happiness throughout the universe. The hermit, undeterred, makes such a botch of things, he's stuffed in a cannon and fired across the galaxy to get rid of him.

The translator Michael Kandel is justly praised for his translations of Lem, and this one is full of brio; there are crazy, wonderful puns and poeticisms, just the sorts of things that are usually labelled untranslatable.

Very entertaining.

This will do for Poland for my European Reading Challenge, hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader.

John Fowles' The Magus (#1965Club)

"...in every way except that of mere publishing date, it is a first novel."

What a strange thing this novel is. I really wanted to dislike it. The blurb on the cover, from the New York Review of Books, says, "Brilliant and colossal...Impossible to stop reading." Brilliant and colossal? Hmm. I have my doubts. Impossible to stop reading? I did rather find that to be true.

I actually read the second edition, that of 1977, but Fowles in his introduction says it was not substantially changed in either theme or narrative from the 1965 version. He expresses doubts about its merits: "The Magus remained essentially where a tyro taught himself to write novels..." Still, it is the one Fowles novel that shows up on the Random House/Modern Library greatest novels of the 20th Century in English. Go figure.

Here's the story: Nicholas Urfe has recently graduated from Oxford and is knocking about a bit in England, needing a job, wishing to go abroad. He's orphaned and has literary ambitions. He takes a job as English master at a school on the (imaginary) Greek island Phraxos, leaving behind one girl, Alison, and finding there another girl, Lily. But most importantly he finds the Greek/English gazillionaire, Maurice Conchis, who invites him to stay weekends at his villa. And he goes, even after he'd been explicitly warned not to.

Maurice Conchis is the titular magus.

Mysterious things start happening to Urfe. Dead puritans and Edwardian girls appear. Pan-figures and Nazis. Are they ghosts? Are they actors? Are they illusions, post-hypnotic suggestions? Conchis is a hypnotist and a Jungian. For a while he claims he's running an experiment in psychology. Who of these exactly are under Conchis' control and to what extent? Maybe that Edwardian girl likes Urfe or maybe she's acting. Or maybe both.

Conchis tells Urfe at one point he prefers his name pronounced with an un-Greek soft 'ch' so he's actually Conscious? A character de Deukans appears in an embedded story; he may be Conchis in disguise. De Deukans = Latin deducens, meaning leading out? And Urfe, we're told in the introduction, is Fowles' childhood mispronunciation of the word Earth. It's that sort of book.

"I have cordially detested allegory ever since I was old enough to detect its presence."

-J. R. R. Tolkien (though I didn't look it up to get the quote right)

And while it's not exactly Everyman, episodes of Nazi retributions and interracial sex are there largely to make philosophical points. This risks becoming merely an emotional bludgeon. And yet, and yet. It is pretty readable stuff.

I did anticipate the twist at the end, though, which made the final part feel a bit draggy.

I do think it's a book best read young. From Fowles' introduction:

"I now know the generation whose mind it most attracts, and that it must always substantially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent."

Ouch! Fowles is a little harsh on himself, but I can't say he's fundamentally wrong. However, to Fowles' credit, there is some of that same sardonic humor in the novel itself.

Anyway, I guess the book was a hit when it came out in 1965. I feel like it was of its time. If it had come out in the fifties, corresponding to when Fowles wrote it, it would have had to wait until that moment its natural peers, Steppenwolf and The Doors of Perception, also became popular. I feel like there ought to have been a band called Magus.

And for another view Ruthiella also read it for this week.

I'm a good girl, I am

"I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play, both on stage and screen, all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that great art can never be anything else."

What with the movie versions (especially My Fair Lady), Pygmalion is too well known in one form or another to need any summary from me. You know what happens: Liza learns "English."

What I will say is how good a read I found it. (Not so dry a subject as all that.) I'm usually a little doubtful about reading plays--all dialog and no description make them harder for me to sink into--but I didn't find that a problem with Pygmalion at all. Of course, Shaw's stage directions are so very extensive, it is practically a novel, albeit a bit dialog-heavy by most novel standards. I've never seen a stage version, but the set descriptions, with the amount of the furniture specified for numerous sets, would seem to make it rather a challenge to put on, at least adhering to Shaw's intentions. It may be more like what he wanted as a movie anyway. (Though he's supposed to have hated Hollywood, and disdained the Oscar he got for his screenplay.)

I will also say, Shaw clearly has some opinions about apostrophes, but I couldn't figure out what they were. "Dont," "havnt," "lets," but "he'd" and "I'm." I could not figure out what his rule is. I almost accused my version of being badly proofread, but it's probably not true. I'm sure the information is available somewhere, but it wasn't evident to me.

Some quotes:

"Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you havnt any future to think of."

"Oh, if only I'd known what a dreadful thing it is to be clean I'd never have come..."

and for you #Dewithon19 readers:

"Sentimental rhetoric! That's the Welsh strain in him. It also accounts for his mendacity and dishonesty."

I'd also say, Oh, George. Never explain. The afterword tells us who Liza Doolittle marries and everything that happens afterwards. But the play proper ends with the question of who Liza marries (if anyone) up in the air. (As does My Fair Lady, though as for that, does anyone really doubt Audrey Hepburn's about to marry Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins?) Shaw's afterword (from 1942) was mostly a disappointment.

But, on the whole, what an incredible hoot.

This is so very London a play with the opening scene in Covent Garden and much discussion of the Cockney accent, but Shaw was born in Dublin, so it will be my contribution to #ReadingIrelandMonth2019. I had higher hopes for doing a bit more Irish this month, but it didn't happen. It's also a book off my Classics Club list:

Endre Farkas' Never, Again

Never, Again (2016, Signature Editions) is the story of Tomas "Tomi" Wolfstein, an eight-year-old who, with his Jewish, Holocaust-surviving parents, escapes Hungary during the chaos of the Russian invasion of 1956.

I assumed from the start it was an autobiographical novel and, in an afterword, Farkas does say that he draws from his own experiences, but that it should be read as a novel. But Farkas was eight in 1956, and emigrated at that time to Canada with his Holocaust-surviving parents.

Farkas is a poet and playwright based in Montreal, but I believe this is his first novel.

Most of the chapters are told from young Tomi's viewpoint in 1956. He first appears in what seems a pretty idyllic childhood in a small town in Hungary: he wants to be a soccer star and actually seems pretty good; Hungary had won the gold at the 1952 Olympics so it's popular. He's a good student. His relationship with his parents is lovely and charmingly presented; his cousin is his best friend; his aunt and uncle also look out for him. Only gradually do we learn how protected, how limited Tomi's view is.

There are flashbacks to when that aunt and uncle tried to leave Hungary (in 1948) and were arrested and convicted as enemies of the state. Then there are more flashbacks to the actual events of the Holocaust his parents suffered and survived.

Farkas writes extraordinarily well about childhood and Tomi's limited viewpoint is sweet but also allows us to be shocked by what happens. It's great for building suspense: the actual days of the escape across the border to Austria do thrill, even though we know or at least suspect what's going to happen.

The flashbacks I found less successful. The look at 1948, when his aunt and uncle tried to leave and failed was interesting enough and probably necessary. I'm afraid I found the actual episodes in the concentration camps to be unnecessary and second-hand. I wish I felt that the literature of witness was enough to prevent it happening again, but I don't: those who least need to be reminded are the likeliest to consume the book, and, as a society, we're informed about one horrible example and fail to see it when it occurs the second time, just a bit differently.

The interesting historical thing in the book to me was the fear of resurgent anti-Semitism in Hungary in 1956; the parents in the volume are anti-Communist to the extent they can be, but they also don't trust the Hungarians not to resort to right-wing anti-Semitism, especially in the chaos of what might be revolutionary times. In the village where they live, the family is targeted because they are Jewish. We think of Imre Nagy as heroic, and he did die for his resistance to Russian tyranny. But were all the elements of his coalition equally admirable? An interesting question.

Well, Farkas does change the rallying cry of "Never again" to his title Never, Again.

Anyway, quite a strong novel, even if I found the 1956 parts better than the others.

Good for a couple of challenges for me: it completes my Canadian Literature challenge at thirteen, though I'm sure I'll read a few more before next Canada Day. And it actually also completes my European Reading Challenge at five books by covering Hungary, though I'm quite sure I will go way over the top again this year...

Ariosto's Orlando Furioso

Orlando Furioso (Crazy Orlando) is one of those sequels more famous than its precursor. Matteo Maria Boiardo wrote a poem Orlando Innamorato (Orlando In Love) which was published, unfinished, after his death in 1495. Ariosto said I've got to finish that, and so he did, publishing his final version in 1532.

The simple part of the story is this: Orlando, the top knight in Charlemagne's court, falls in love with the beautiful pagan Angelica. She mostly dodges him, but for a long time doesn't tell him no definitively. But when she meets Medoro, who needs her for more than her beauty, she falls in love with Medoro; Orlando goes nuts when he finds out--not wearing any clothes and wandering the countryside.

But that's just one thread in this monumental work, which can't be easily summarized. There's also the love of Ruggiero and Bradamante, the mythical ancestors of the house of Este, dukes of Ferrara, Ariosto's patrons. There's war between Islam and Christianity, with the Muslim army on the verge of sacking Paris. (Hmm, not very historical, that.) And there's magical armor, lances, and swords. For you Quixote readers out there, the actual helmet of Mambrino makes an appearance. There's even a hippogriff, that various people fly around on, including the English knight Astolfo, who heads up to the moon to get the cure for Orlando's insanity. So, you know, stuff happens.

I was reading it in David R. Slavitt's verse translation, published by Harvard. I'd read it before in the prose translation of Guido Waldman. You need to know that the Slavitt translation published by Harvard is incomplete, with only a little over half included. Slavitt is discreet about this in his introduction, but apparently it wasn't his idea to publish only a partial version. The economics were such Harvard was unwilling to publish the whole as a two volume book. (A little over half is still 650 pages.) The rest of Slavitt's version came out eventually as Lacunae with a lesser-known press. I haven't read it.

I've liked other Slavitt translations I've read--he does a nice job with the obscure Latin poet Ausonius for instance--and when I saw he'd done Ariosto I thought I'd have to read it. And it reads well. It seems to demand the word brio; in any case Michael Dirda uses it in a review that gets blurbed on my paperback edition. Ariosto writes in ottava rima, the eight line stanza of iambic pentameter that rhymes ABABABCC, a meter that's trickier in English than it is in Italian. That's two triple rhymes per stanza. The most famous poem in English in this meter is Byron's Don Juan (deeply influenced by Orlando Furioso) and it opens like this:

I want a hero: an uncommon want,
  When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
  The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
  I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan--
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.

You see that the triple rhyme allows some comic possibilities. (And yes, I'm quite sure Byron knows that Juan is not supposed to rhyme with true one.)

So in comparison how does Slavitt handle the verse form? (And yes, I'm comparing him to Byron. That is a high standard. He merits that.) Here's a couple of stanzas I picked out:

This is the very net that Vulcan made
of finest threads of steel, and with such art
that no one could untangle any braid
or pick the knots that held it together apart.
This is the one in which Venus and Mars laid.
(Lay, surely? No, no. One another! Start
paying attention. It's transitive. Use your head.)
But this is the net that caught those two in bed.

-Canto XV stanza 56

Women have achieved in every art
and craft the highest distinction, and their fame
is great indeed. They're strong and they are smart.
Without them history couldn't have been the same.
I rather think it is envy on man's part
that keeps concealed the honor and acclaim
they have deserved. If their work is not taught in schools
it is because men are jealous--or are fools.

-Canto XX stanza 2

Here's a couple of things I'd note: Slavitt allows more substitutions in the meter than does Byron. Well, he is a couple of centuries later and free verse has happened. 'But this is the net that caught those two in bed.' It's an anapaest for an iamb in that second foot. I guess that's fine by me. The scansion of the previous line in that stanza is even trickier.

There's also a lot more enjambment: "Start/paying attention," "fame/is great indeed." I'm less certain about this. That sort of thing really de-emphasizes the rhyme and, for me, makes it feel just a bit prosaic, especially used as often as Slavitt does.

Another minor grouse is that Slavitt continues to use the Italian version of everybody's name. Well, it wouldn't feel right to change Orlando back to Roland. But that so many names end in 'o' means he has to rhyme on them a little too often. Ruggiero could be Roger. Once or twice a triple rhyme like "hero/Ruggiero/hear: 'O!'" is amusing. That exclamatory 'O!' ends a lot of lines. There are perhaps too many of them because too many of them are required.

There are also liberties. The first stanza quoted above jokes about the trouble even English speakers have with lay and laid. That joke could not conceivably exist in Italian. Well, they say, Ariosto is funny in Italian. So how do you do that in English? Slavitt's way is one way, and you may or may not be comfortable with it. Also Slavitt uses anachronisms, though I suspect so did Ariosto. At one point The Other Reader picked up the book, saw a reference to Freud and Ferenczi (with two other rhymes on Ferenczi!) and exclaimed, "He's not even trying!" Well, yes, he was trying. And maybe you find him trying. You'll have to decide how you feel about that.

I took a bunch of notes about how Ariosto is also placing himself in the tradition of classical epic. Since I've reread the Aeneid relatively recently, that's the one that struck me the most. (Nisus and Euryalus become Medoro and Clorindo; Rodomonte does the Turnus in the walls thing, etc.) But there's also an Odyssean Cyclops episode. Had I read Dante more recently, I'm sure there would be a bunch of resonances there. However, this post is already long enough...and I've just made it that much longer with this sneaky bit of praeteritio...

Anyway, should you read Orlando Furioso? Would you like it? If you're the sort of person who's read to this point in my blog entry, 😉and you haven't read it, then the answer is almost certainly yes. It's funny, it's engaging, and it's important in Western literature. Should you read David Slavitt's translation, especially as your first approach to it? Hmm, I'm less certain about that. I liked the Slavitt,  but I'd read Orlando before. The Penguin is also in ottava rima, by Barbara Reynolds, and it's complete (though the second volume of that seems like it might be out of print.) Slavitt accuses it of being insufficiently funny, but now I'm inclined to make that my third reading of Orlando Furioso. Someday.

But for now I'm keen to go read The Faerie Queene from my Classics Club list, another of those works deeply influenced by Orlando Furioso.

Borislav Pekić' Houses

Since I have now reached those years in which man's allotted span comes to its natural end, and moreover since my health is no longer of the best, I, Arsénie Negovan, son of Cyrill Negovan, rentier here residing, have decided, being fully lucid and in possession of all of my mental faculties as prescribed by law, to set down this testament,...

So opens Houses of Borislav Pekić. We soon learn it's Belgrade in June of 1968, so you may have some doubts about how lucid Arsénie Negovan actually is, if he thinks he's a rentier. You're right to doubt.

Arsénie is 77 when he's writing this combination last testament/memoir and earlier that day he'd been caught up in Belgrade's version of the 1968 student riots. Arsénie can't stick to a timeline, but we gradually learn that he acquired or had built, with the help of a contractor cousin, a number of houses in Belgrade during the 20s and 30s and he really was a rich property owner renting out residences and living off the proceeds.

But he doesn't think of himself as a typical exploitative property owner. He loves his houses; he gives them all girls' names, Sofia, Irina, Eudoxia, above all, Simonida and the lost Niké. He doesn't feel he has to maximize his income. The houses have a soul only he can preserve.

"...so that the Possessor becomes the Possessed without losing any of the traditional function of Possession, and the Possessed becomes the Possessor without in any way losing the characteristics of the Possessed."

Hmm. Is it houses we're talking about?

Then the Second World War and Communism came to Yugoslavia. I had to remind myself from Wikipedia, but Yugoslavia remained neutral even after the Italians tried to invade Greece, but failed. When it came time for Hitler to rescue his Italian ally, he put pressure on the Yugoslav government to join the Axis and at first the Yugoslavs did so under the regent Prince Paul, but riots in 1941, encouraged by the British, led to the overthrow of the Regency, allowing the seventeen-year-old Peter II to assume the throne. The Germans subsequently invaded Yugoslavia, as a by-stop on their way to Greece.

Arsénie was caught up in that 1941 riot and badly injured; from that day until 1968 he never left his house. Well, a few things changed in the meantime. Because Arsénie was presumed to be frail and with heart trouble, his wife Katarina and his nurse Mlle. Foucault 'took care of' his property, and Arsénie's folie was nurtured. Until he feels Simonida is threatened by renovation and he must once again leave the house.

There are number of details about Negovan family relationships that come out over the course the novel, Arsénie's brother, his cousin, his son, his nephew. How good (or bad) a person is Arsénie? It's a question the novel invites us to ask. Well, he's bad enough that this novel about a haute bourgeois can be published in Yugoslavia under Tito. But not so clearly villainous that as a result Pekić felt more comfortable emigrating to London a year after it was published. Pekić had already spent five years in jail as a Center-Left Democrat in the immediate post-war period.

The introduction compares Arsénie to Don Quixote and that's not a bad comparison, though perhaps a little too forgiving. Arsénie does real damage and only sometimes means well, less reliably than Don Quixote.

Anyway, I thought it was very good, though a little difficult to get into at first, because the narration is a bit mad and disjointed (and I know very little about Belgrade). But I was glad I stuck it out. It seems Pekić wrote another seven novels about the Negovan family, as a group called The Golden Fleece, not yet translated into English. I say, get on them!

Pekić was born to a prominent family in Montenegro, but this is so clearly a Belgrade novel, I really feel uncomfortable using it for anything but Serbia in Gilion's European Reading Challenge. So Serbia it is!

As a side note: in reading Wikipedia about the events of the time, I discovered that Peter II, that 17-year-old king who took over in 1941, spent a great deal of time in Chicago after the war where there was a large Yugoslav community. My father's boss in Chicago when he worked at RCA in the 60s and 70s was a Serb royalist, Milan, I no longer recall his last name, who had, I was told, seen some terrible things fighting as a partisan during World War II. I met Milan once or twice, maybe when I was seven or eight. Could I have met the former king of Yugoslavia when I was child? Well, I'm quite sure I didn't, but perhaps it was only two degrees of separation...

Robert Gerwarth's The Vanquished

"On 23 March 1919 we raised the black flag of the fascist revolution, the forerunner of European renewal. Veterans of the trenches and young men gathered around this flag, forming squads that wished to march against the cowardly governments and against fatal Eastern ideologies, in order to free the people from the influence of 1789. Thousands of comrades fell around this flag, fighting like heroes, in the truest meaning of the Roman word, in the streets and squares of Italy, in Africa and in Spain. Their memory is always alive and present in our hearts. Some people may have forgotten the hardships of the post-war years, but the squadristi have not forgotten, they cannot forget."

That's from a speech of Benito Mussolini gave in 1939, and quoted in Robert Gerwarth's The Vanquished: Why The First World War Failed To End. It's pretty representative of why Gerwarth thinks his period is important, and I would agree.

The main period he covers in his book runs from the revolutions in Russia in 1917 until the Treaty of Lausanne between Atatürk's new Turkey and the victors of WWI in 1923. It covers pretty much every country that was engaged in that war, plus a few that weren't (Spain, for instance) but brings all the major events together in a way I hadn't seen before.

Some of them are well enough known, even to English readers, particularly the Russian Civil War of the early 1920s and the negotiations of the Versailles Treaty. Maybe less well-known, but not completely obscure, are the revolutions in Germany that led to the founding of the Weimar Republic, and the Greco-Turkish War of 1919 to 1922, but there are lots of other events are described or alluded to: the war of Irish Independence, the coup in Spain that led to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in 1923, the March on Fiume and the Regency of Carnaro, the Hungary of Béla Kun, so many others.

The bio on the back flap tells me that Gerwarth is a professor of Modern History at the University College Dublin, but Wikipedia adds that he was born in Germany and mostly educated there. The (extensive) bibliography includes works in English and German, unsurprisingly, but also Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian. Does he know all these languages? Yikes! Maybe so. It does seem he's ridiculously competent to write this book.

Anyway, it's a period that interests me, and it's well-done. Recommended, if you're at all interested in World War I, its politics and its impact. The book came out in 2016 and I saw it recommended as one of the best history books of that year by Steve Donoghue of Open Letters Monthly. I can't conceivably keep up with Donoghue's level of reading, but I think he was probably right.

With it touching so many European countries, I could use it for practically anywhere in my European Reading Challenge, and so I will use it for one of the more obscure ones, of course... 😉

It was full of information I didn't know about the Finnish Civil War or the Finnish War of Liberation, depending on how you look at it, of 1918. It also covered the short-lived Republic of Armenia of 1920 and 1921. But one of the most interesting bits was the early history of Latvia when it first established independence at the end of World War I, an independence later obliterated in 1939. Freikorps troops--independent German soldiers--fought against Russian revolutionaries at the instigation of the British and French, but then also fought against Latvian nationalists. And I discovered Marguerite Yourcenar wrote a novel in 1939 about that conflict, titled Coup de Grace. Who knew? (Well, I'm sure there are many somebodies who did, but I wasn't one of them.) So I'm going to call this one for Latvia for my European Reading Challenge.

Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday

I have never attached so much importance to my own person that I would have been tempted to tell others the story of my life.

Stefan Zweig was a well-known author when he penned that opening line to his autobiography and he acts on it. It's the least personally revealing autobiography I can think of. His first wife shows up only as an element in the occasional 'we'. If you didn't know she was there, you might think he was being royal. His second wife features in an anecdote about his life as a refugee from Hitler, but she herself is little more present than his first.

We get a little more information about his Jewish parents: his father made money in textiles; he made the transition from shtetl to industrialist. His mother's family was an old banking family. Thus Zweig himself was the second son of a haute bourgeois family. (Though we don't learn anything about that older brother.)

None of that much matters, though; that's not what he's interested in. He's a young man interested in the arts:

"I had not read La Bohéme for nothing, without wishing at twenty, to live a similar life."

I find it interesting he says 'read.' The opera I see dates from 1896 and would have pretty brand new when he was twenty; the book is 1851.

Zweig emphasizes his interest as a collector: he searches out manuscripts of Goethe, Beethoven, and Mozart, and particularly those that show the moment of creation, and that's what interests him in his personal life, too. There are various reasons I was interested in this book, but one of them is Zweig's interest in Romain Rolland; Zweig wrote a biography of Rolland in 1921 which I read last fall. He also wrote biographies of Emile Verhaeren, Paul Verlaine, and Sigmund Freud, among people of his own time, as well as various historical figures. He meets James Joyce and offers to translate Portrait of an Artist into German; André Gide visits him at his flat in Paris, and tells him only a foreigner could find so lovely a spot; Zweig helps save Rilke's library, stranded in Paris during World War I; Richard Strauss uses Zweig as his librettist and has to defend the resulting opera against the Nazis; Zweig visits Freud in London and introduces him to Salvador Dalí. Zweig happily puts himself in the middle of the cultural world.

Zweig is endearingly modest about his role; though he knows he's a success, he's not impressed with that part, and what he wants you to think about, and hope for, and work for, is the cultural unity of Europe.

All peoples feel only that a strange shadow hangs broad and heavy over their lives. But we, who once knew a world of individual freedom, know and can give testimony that Europe once, without a care, enjoyed the kaleidoscopic play of color. And we shudder when we think how overcast, overshadowed, enslaved and enchained our world has become because of our suicidal fury.

Sadly all too relevant today. He quotes, with approval, a letter from Rolland, written during the first world war:

Je ne quitterai jamais mes amis.

and one feels that would be true of Zweig.

But let us hope, especially today, with the chaos of the English vote and the assassination of the Europhile mayor of Danzig, that his nearly final words won't apply:

...my most cherished aim to which I had devoted all the power of my conviction for forty years, the peaceful union of Europe, had been defiled. What I had now feared more than my own death, the war of all against all, now had become unleashed for the second time.

I read it in the seemingly anonymous, first English translation of 1943, reprinted in the 70s with a useful introduction by the translator and scholar Harry Zohn. That's what the Toronto Public Library has, but it has been retranslated by the late, great Anthea Bell, which I assume should be preferred.

The other reason this crossed my radar was that Wes Anderson said it was an influence for The Grand Budapest Hotel; who knows what enables Wes Anderson to do the (amazing, IMHO) things he does, but the connection between the two seems a bit tenuous frankly.

Zweig is the great pan-Europeanist so the book could qualify for a number of different countries, but since he was born in Austria, and came later he says to feel a certain Austrian patriotism, I'll count it for Austria for this year's European Reading Challenge:

And at 454 pages, plus a separately numbered preface, it qualifies, although just, as large enough for my Chunkster Reading Challenge: