European Reading Challenge Wrapup 2023

 

Well, I squeezed in one last book review just yesterday, but there will be no more squeezing in, and my bookish travels in Europe are done for the year. The final list:

1.) Henry James/The Wings of the Dove (Italy)

2.) Robert Gerwarth/November 1918 (Germany)

3.) Eric Ambler/The Levanter (Cyprus)

4.) Samuel Butler/The Way of All Flesh (UK)

5.) Victor Gruen/Shopping Town (Austria)

6.) Honoré de Balzac/Cousin Bette (France)

7.) Georgi Gospodinov/Time Shelter (Bulgaria)

8.) Robert Aickman/Go Back At Once (Croatia)

9.) Olga Tokarczuk/The Books of Jacob (Poland)

10.) Ivo Andrić/Omer Pasha Latas (Bosnia)

11.) Owen Matthews/Overreach (Russia)

12.) Anna Comnena/The Alexiad (Turkey)

13.) Josef Škvorecky/Sins For Father Knox (Czech Republic)

14.) Janwillem van de Wetering/Outsider in Amsterdam (Netherlands)

15.) Homer/The Iliad (tr. Emily Wilson) (Greece)

16.) Leah Horlick/Moldovan Hotel (Moldova)

17.) Herta Müller/The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (Romania)

Seventeen isn't my best ever number for this challenge, but is pretty good for me, and is in any case well over the five I pledged for. 

There are two new countries I haven't previously visited for this challenge: Cyprus and Moldova. There continue to be six I've visited every year: Italy, Germany, the UK, Austria, France, and Romania. This year's best visits were Poland and Italy, though Croatia was fun and quirky, too.

Thanks again to Gilion for hosting!

Herta Müller's The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

 "Where does it come from, he asked, this sympathy?"

Adina is a schoolteacher in the late years of Communist Romania. Her circle of friends include Paul, a musician, and Clara, who works in a factory. Paul's band gets in trouble with the secret police because some apparatchik thinks their latest song is about the dictator Ceauşescu, and so Paul, even though he's not the lyricist, ends up in trouble dragging down Adina and the others.

Then somebody, surely the Securitate, start to invade Adina's apartment and cut off the tail and then one by one the legs of a fox fur she's sentimentally attached to. She and Paul decide to flee to a more remote part of the countryside. Do they dare to flee the country? Escapees are frequently shot at the border. 

But they're saved by the bell as it were: 1989 happens, and it's of pictures of the dead Ceauşescus that the question I opened with is asked. Sympathy is hard to imagine.

This is the second novel of Herta Müller's I've read, and the setup is somewhat similar to The Land of Green Plums, which I read earlier: a group of young people in the late years of Communist Romania, potentially intellectuals, oppressed by the secret police. Cooperate? Escape? Lie low? The Land of Green Plums takes place a few years earlier than this and there's no rescue in sight.

I thought this was good, but I was more impressed by The Land of Green Plums (1994 in German).  I felt the characters were better differentiated in that novel, which made the choices feel more poignant. This is a shorter book, only 220 pages, with fairly large margins, practically a novella in length. The opening started with quite a lot of folkloric elements: gypsies who are afraid of hares, the tooth fairy, who's a mouse in Romania, it seems:

"Mouse O mouse bring me a brand new tooth

and you can have my old one."

This felt a little odd at first, like it was more anthropological documentation than dramatically necessary, though in the end I did feel it helped set up the fairly folkloric bit about attacking Adina's fox fur. The novel got better as it went on. Still. The wisdom of the Internet suggests that The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, and The Hunger Angel are her best works. I'll probably try one of the two of those I haven't read next, but I will try them. She's good.

Müller was born in 1953 to the German-speaking minority in Romania, got out of the country in 1987 and settled in Germany where she still lives. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

I was (grimly) amused by this joke one of the characters tells in the novel: a Romanian who's led a bad life is whisked off to Hell after his death where he's buried up to his neck in boiling mud. Once he's settled in, he looks around and sees Nicolae Ceauşescu in the boiling mud, but only up to his shins. Our anonymous Romanian complains to the demon in charge of the boiling mud department, What's up with that? The demon replies, What can you do? He's standing on the shoulders of his wife.

This came out in German in 1992, was translated into English by Philip Boehm in 2016, and is my visit to Romania for 2023.

Boccaccio's The Decameron (Classics Club Spin)

"...if what young people do in the name of love should be called a sin..." [435]

...then this is is not the book for you.

Giovanni Boccaccio started writing his The Decameron some time shortly after the Black Death of 1348, and finished it in 1352. Ten young people (Fiammetta, Lauretta, Panfilo, etc.)

are left rootless by the plague and decide to leave Florence and live in the countryside to escape. There they spend their time in dancing, singing, eating well, and most importantly telling stories, quite often about what young people do in the name of love. These ten (seven girls and three boys) each tell a story a day for ten days (over a period of two weeks) making a hundred stories.  Dioneo claims the privilege of telling the last story on each day, and his are pretty reliably the extra-bawdy ones.

Eight of the ten days have a theme assigned--magnanimity, trickery, or tragedy, for example. Most of my favorite stories came on the day where the theme was love, dogged by troubles, comes a happy end, (Day 5) but maybe that was just the mood I was in.  '...where he lived with her in peace and prosperity for a great many years to come.' [429] There were a bunch of stories that day ending like that and I liked 'em. 😉

"Now, since the reason we are here is to enjoy ourselves and have some fun,..." [715]

Lauretta, as imagined by Jules Lefebvre

Boccaccio gathered his stories from earlier collections in Latin or other languages; though influenced by Dante's Divine Comedy, he also tells stories of real people. Maybe he's telling those for the first time? Though it's also possible he's slotting historical people into traditional stories. Generally characters are new in each story, though some reappear. Calandrino, a not very bright painter, who is a historical figure, appears in several stories, together with his (?) friends Bruno and Buffalmacco, always suckering poor Calandrino into some gaffe. You can go see the paintings of all three even today (albeit in lesser-known Italian churches).

Did I mention the sex? One of the most famous stories is where a priest teaches a naive young woman how he's going to put the devil in hell. Do I need to explain? Probably not and anyway, I'm not going to. 

Boccaccio is mostly OK with religion, but he's pretty anti-clerical:

"a friar who was, without doubt, some gluttonous soup-swilling pie muncher" [259]

A bit ahead of the curve, but I kept thinking he'd made a fine Protestant. 

The stories went on to be reused by others. Chaucer is clearly swiping from Boccaccio in several places. I hadn't realized (and anyway it may not be true) but some consider that Chaucer met Boccaccio (and Petrarch) on one of Chaucer's trips to Italy on royal diplomatic business. Two of Shakespeare's plays have a story from the Decameron as a clear antecedent, though the the line of influence may not be direct, even in the form of translation. (Shakespeare had little Latin, less Greek, and even less Italian.) But the ninth story of Day 2 is the Cymbeline, and the ninth story of Day 3 is All's Well That Ends Well. Another of Boccaccio's stories suggested to me The Winter's Tale, though neither the notes in this volume, nor the Internets in general seemed to see what I saw. 

After I finished it I reread Poe's Masque of the Red Death, whose connection to the  Decameron in the end is pretty slight, I thought, but also Keats' long poem 'Isabella, or the Pot of Basil', which was based on a fairly Gothic story from that day of tragedies. I don't think it was Keats at his finest, and it was the day of tragic stories, my least favorite day, but another example of Boccaccio's influence.

Anyway, a substantial tome...

"Nothing will seem long to those who read in order to pass the time." [858]

...off my Classics Club list that I've been hemming and hawing over for a while. I'd started it once years ago in the Penguin translation before I even started blogging, but didn't finish it; for this reading I used the Wayne Rebhorn translation in a Norton paperback (shown above) that first came out in 2013. (The page numbers are to that version.) It won some awards and is pretty readable, I thought, though the Other Reader (who read it before I did) was put off by the use of Amurrican to represent what must have been a regional dialect in Italian. Well, translating dialect is always tricky.

However, the Decameron is a work that can usefully have notes, and the notes didn't strike me as very good in this, which was too bad. Oh, well. I did finish this version, even if I started skipping the notes after a while, which is more than I can say of the Penguin.

It was my Classics Club spin book, and I finished it a while ago (though not quite on time) but there have been things to do, movies to see, parties to attend or host, cookies to bake, etc., so it's only gotten its blog post now... 😉