Friday, November 1, 2024

Non-Fiction November: My Year (so far)

 

Time to look over my year in non-fiction! It's hosted by Based on a True Story. My non-fiction reading was about 20% of what I've read, which is a fairly normal number for me, maybe a little on the high side.

Themes and Highlights

Mostly books about books, which is pretty common for me. Some standouts:
 
Brian Dillon. Dillon is a contempoary Irish writer. I read two by him this year: Objects in This Mirror and Affinities. Affinities is his most recent (2023); Objects in This Mirror is from ten years ago. Dillon, in addition to writing about books, was the editor at an art magazine, and both these books have a lot of art criticism.
 
Guy Davenport. Davenport was a poet and classicist who died in 2005. His book The Geography of the Imagination, which first came out in 1981, was reissued earlier this year with an introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan. It was pretty great.

Carlo Levi. An Italian writer and painter. Christ Stopped at Eboli is his memoir of internal exile during the Fascist era. After protesting against Mussolini, he was sent to live among the peasants in Basilicata. I read it just before going to Italy in the spring. (Yay!)

Konstantin Stanislavski. My Life in Art is the autobiography of the great Russian theatre director from 1924. It was my spin book for the first Classics Club spin of the year.

Mary Wisniewski. Algren: A Life is a biography of the great (but depressing!) Chicago writer best known for The Man With a Golden Arm, made into a movie with Frank Sinatra in the title role. A well-done biography.
 
A link to all the non-fiction that made it on to the blog this year.

Upcoming

Well, I have several books from the library which I hope to read soon, but the next non-fiction book will be Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make, which I managed to find while on a recent trip to Chicago. It's also novella-length. 😉

Which look fun to you?

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Etienne Jodelle's I Love the Laurel Green (tr. Charles Causley)


I Love The Laurel Green

I love the laurel green, whose verdant flame
Burns its bright victory on the winter day,
Calls to eternity its happy name,
And neither death nor time shall wear away.

I love the holly tree with branches keen,
Each leaflet fringed with daggers sharp and small,
I love the ivy, too, winding its green,
Its ardent stem about the oak, the wall.

I love these three, whose living green and true
Is as unfailing as my love for you
Always by night and day whom I adore.

Yet the green wound that stays with me more
Is ever greener than these three shall be:
Laurel and ivy and the holly tree.

-Etienne Jodelle (tr. Charles Causley)
 
Well, it's not winter yet, but we've reached that time when most of the greens have changed to red and yellow and are fast disappearing; all the green that's left are those three.
 
Étienne Jodelle (1532-1573) was a French poet and dramatist, one of the members of that group of poets known as La Pléiade. Joachim du Bellay, the founder of La Pléiade, showed up on the blog in a translation by Richard Wilbur. This lovely translation is by Charles Causley and is from his book Secret Destinations. 
 
I looked up the French, just because...

J'aime le verd laurier

J'aime le verd laurier, dont l'hyver ny la glace
N'effacent la verdeur en tout victorieuse,
Monstrant l'eternité à jamais bien heureuse
Que le temps, ny la mort ne change ny efface.

J'aime du hous aussi la toujours verte face
Les poignons eguillons de sa fueille espineuse:
J'aime la lierre aussi, et sa branche amoureuse
Qui le chesne ou le mur estroitement embrasse.

J'aime bien tous ces trois, qui toujours verds ressemblent
Aux pensers immorteles, qui dedans moy s'assemblent,
De toy que nuict et jour idolatre, j'adore:

Mais ma playe, et poincture, et le Noeu qui me serre,
Est plus verte, et poignante, et plus estroit encore
Que n'est le verd laurier, ny le hous, ny le lierre.

-Étienne Jodelle

It's archaic now, of course, but it didn't actually seem that difficult, at least once I learned the words for ivy and holly...


Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Kurban Said, Lev Nussimbaum, and Tom Reiss

A while back I read the first novel Ali and Nino by Kurban Said and found it delightful. Time for a book bender! My library delivered.

The Girl From The Golden Horn

The second (and last completed) novel by Kurban Said is The Girl from the Golden Horn. It came out in German in 1938 and was translated into English by Jenia Gramm in 2001. 

Achmed-Pasha Anbari with his daughter Asiadeh have left Constantinople for Berlin. He was a higher-up in the Ottoman administration and with the fall of the Ottoman monarchy at the end of World War I, he no longer feels welcome in Atatürk's Turkey. He does what he can in Berlin to scrape up enough money so his daughter can get an education; she's studying Comparative Turkish philology at university. She's the Girl from the Golden Horn.

While there still was an Ottoman empire, Asiadeh was promised to an Ottoman prince before she was of age. But what are the Ottomans now? Where even is her prince? She sends a letter to the Turkish consulate to forward on to the prince, asking him to either claim her or relinquish her. He chooses to relinquish.

That's fine because in the meantime she had a cold and met the university's doctor, Alex Hassa. She's in love, and Hassa, an unhappy divorcé, loves her back and needs her. They marry, go on a honeymoon, and settle in Vienna where Dr. Hassa starts a practice.

Then the prince shows up and now he wants to marry her. 

In Ali and Nino before politics intervened, the difficulties between the two were cultural: he was Muslim and she was Christian. This novel turns on similar lines except she's the Muslim and he's Christian. She doesn't wear the veil now. Does she miss it? Do girls really need to be educated? Hassa as it turns out is short for Hassanovič, that is the son of Hussein, and Dr. Hassa's family before they converted were Muslim. Does that help?

I don't think the novel was quite as wonderful as Ali and Nino, but still it was good. Asiadeh has to figure out what she wants and how to get there with her dignity intact. She does.

The Orientalist

In that post on Ali and Nino  I discussed the mystery of Kurban Said a bit. It's a pseudonym, but for whom? The likeliest candidate was Lev Nussimbaum, born in 1905. He was a Jew, and grew up in Baku, Azerbaijan. Tom Reiss wrote an article for The New Yorker on Nussimbaum, and then expanded it into a book in 2005.

Lev's father was Abraham, a well-to-do oilman in Baku; his mother died when Lev was 6, likely a suicide because she'd been detected in revolutionary politics. During World War I, Lev and his father fled to Persia when there was violence in Baku; later they return to the short-lived Republic of Azerbaijan, but are forced to flee again when the Bolsheviks arrive, this time through Georgia and then Constantinople. They finally pitch up in Berlin, where Lev attends a high school for Russian emigres. (With the sisters of Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Nabokov! Lydia and Elena, respectively. Elena is considered quite the beauty.)

And somewhere along the way, Lev Nussimbaum converts to Islam and changes his name to Essad Bey. 

As Essad Bey he becomes a best-selling writer of non-fiction in the 20s and the first half of the 30s, writing close to a book a year as well as becoming the Eastern Europe and Middle East expert for the magazine Die Literarische Welt, which also published Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Döblin. (Think New York Review of Books, Reiss says.) Busy, but they needed the money, especially after it became clear that the Bolsheviks weren't going away, and any claims Abraham had still in Azerbaijan were going to be valueless.

Nussimbaum got married, to a Bata shoe heiress, and divorced. The divorce was covered by gossip papers on both sides of the Atlantic.

He was a controversial figure: Was he Jewish, was he Muslim, where was he really from? Nussimbaum claimed he was born on a train between Zurich and Baku, but he was given to romanticizing, so who knows? With a background like that it's unsurprising he was a staunch anti-Bolshevik. His anti-Communism and his conversion to Islam helped after the Nazis came to power for a while; his books still could be published in Germany until 1935. But he was on a lecture tour in 1933 and doesn't return to Germany, but stays in Austria. When Anschluss looks likely he wangles a contract to write a biography of Mussolini and moves there. (That biography never materialized.) By then his health is poor; he has a severe case of Reynaud's syndrome, which leads to gangrene and the amputation of his toes. To deal with the pain he's become addicted to morphine. He dies in Positano, Italy, in 1942.

And did he write those Kurban Said books? The evidence Reiss offers is pretty strong and Reiss thinks they were entirely Nussimbaum's work. But Nussimbaum was willing to co-author and I think it's impossible to rule it out. The books were copyrighted under the name of Baroness von Ehrenfels of Austria. Did she help write or did she just help by being the front person for German publication? I don't suspect we'll ever know for sure.

Nussimbaum is a fascinating figure and Reiss has got a hold of a good topic. I do think the expansion to a book shows signs of haste: Reiss writes about the Freikorps and Walter Rathenau; interesting topics, but they don't have a whole lot to do with Nussimbaum. He writes about G. S. Viereck, the American Nazi sympathizer, who was an acquaintance of Nussimbaum,  but he kind of repeats himself. Still, a good read. And now I want to find Essad Bey's Blood and Oil in the Orient. It was the story of the Nussimbaum's escape from Baku when the Bolsheviks marched in. It was marketed as non-fiction when it came out; Reiss says its half-fiction, but it still sounds pretty thrilling.

Reiss later went on to write The Black Count, about Alexandre Dumas' military father, which got pretty good press when it came out. I was interested in it at the time, but didn't read it, but that may change.

Both these books march around Europe, so pick a country. "The ideas you have!" said Hassa. "Nobody ever goes to Belgrade on their honeymoon." Serbia's tempting, but I'll go with Bosnia, which that honeymoon also included. A crucial scene takes place in Sarajevo, where Dr. Hassa's family is from. When Dr. Hassa and Asiadeh first meet:

"There was an Anbari who was the governor of Bosnia."
"Yes," said the girl. "That was my grandfather."

For The Orientalist, I'll say Turkey, since I've already used Azerbaijan for Ali and Nino. It was Constantinople was where Lev Nussimbaum became Essad Bey.