The Plague | Albert Camus #ReadtheNobels

What does one read during a pandemic that has changed the way we all live our lives? 

The Plague (La Peste) by Albert Camus of course! 

This existentialist (or absurdist, depending on who you talk to) classic from 1947 presents us with the day to day changes that occurred in a small city in Algeria when the plague suddenly turned up out of the blue.

The French Algerian town of Oran experienced real life plague events in 1556, 1678 as well as three lesser outbreaks in the early 1900's. Camus wrote his fictional version of The Plague during and after WWII. Since then many have drawn parallels between the coming of the plague in his book and the Nazi's. I'll leave that for students of English and Philosophy to mull over, but for today, this review will focus more on the parallels between what we're all experiencing now with Covid-19 and what the imaginary characters of this real town experienced during their fictional plague.

But first a little reminder about the definition of existentialist literature. 

Existentialism is all about the experience of the individual - the thinking, feeling, acting, living human being - as they navigate an absurd, meaningless world with a sense of confusion, angst, anxiety and disorientation. It is the individuals responsibility to make sense of the world, not society or religion.

While Absurdism is the conflict between the human tendency to seek some kind of inherent value and meaning in life with our inability to actually find any in a purposeless, meaningless, chaotic and irrational universe! Camus was an Absurdist and believed we should live a life rich in 'purposeful experience' in spite of the 'psychological tension of the Absurd'.

The fictional plague in Oran began with the sighting of one dead rat by Dr Bernard Rieux on the 16th April. It was considered to be 'odd' by the doctor and 'a practical joke' by the concierge. The next day there were three dead rats. The doctor was now 'intrigued' while the concierge hung around the doorstep waiting to catch the 'jokers'. However on his rounds, the doctor realised that the dead rats were everywhere and that 'the whole district was talking about the rats.' Most people agreed that it was 'peculiar, but it will pass.'

By the next day the papers had picked up the story and the authorities started to talk about 'emergencies measures.'

In the population, some people complained, some were disconcerted, some felt threatened or anxious. People began to accuse the authorities of inaction and others escaped town completely. Rumours spread along with a sense of foreboding. 'Surprise gradually gave way to panic.'

Mistaken ideas had to be readjusted as new information about the rats and the plague were learnt the hard way...with people dying. Old habits and daily routines had to change and fear set in. 

Dr Rieux was keen to prepare and take precautions, whilst the authorities tried not to upset public opinion. However, hygiene posters popped up around town, gas was injected into the sewers to kill the rats and the water supply was strictly supervised. Hospital wards were 'suitably equipped' and relatives of patients were urged to get tested.

Some people began to suggest the whole thing was exaggerated and refused to change their ways. Trams were still packed and the theatres and restaurants were full each night as many chose to defy the odds and thought that somehow the plague would not affect them.

As things worsened, the ports were closed and guards were set on the town gates. The people blamed the authorities and prioritised 'their personal concerns.' Discussions raged about whether everyone was actually dying of the plague or of other causes instead or even whether this number of deaths was within the normal range for the month.

A sense of unreality crept in. Some bewailed their fate, while others 'accepted with good humour'. Monotony and indifference became factors as the 'dreary struggle between the happiness of each individual and the abstractions of the plague' set in.

Summer arrived and the heat served only to exaggerate the fear and anxiety. 'The plague sun extinguished all colours and drove away all joy.' Yet for some 'a sort of crazed excitement, an uneasy freedom' bubbled up, sending them out into the streets, craving pleasure and company, despite the risks.

A vaccination was talked about, with very few understanding the 'industrial quantities' that would be required to actually inoculate the general population. 

Our good doctor believed that most people were more often good than bad and that the main vice was ignorance, especially 'ignorance that thinks it knows everything.' 

There were no longer any individual destinies, but a collective history that was the plague, and feelings shared by all.

As more people became sick and died, exhaustion and indifference set in. People began to neglect the good hygiene practices of before and mass burials became the norm. Irrational superstitions and old prophecies and predictions emerged. At this point, Camus, via his characters went into a lengthy discussion about the nature of good and evil, the meaning of life and death and the lessons that could be learnt from history, yet never seem to be learnt.

As the course and nature of the plague changed, ebbed and flowed and eventaully eased, people reacted with a curious mix of excitement and depression. The uncertainty was the hardest thing to live with, yet saved up reserves of hope were always close to the surface. People began to wonder what life would be look like after the plague. Would it return to 'normal'? What had been changed irrevocably?

'The plague would leave its mark, at least on people's hearts.'

'All that a man could win in the game of plague and life was knowledge and memory.'

Camus leaves the ending open. Deliberately, I suspect. 

We don't get to see the end of the plague in Oran, yet reading this 70 years later, we know that this fictional plague and all the earlier historical plagues did in fact, eventually disappear. So much so, that when another one appears in 2020, we have no knowledge or memory to help us work out what to do! 

It's like each generation has to learn everything anew all over again, ad nauseam, instead of learning from history. One gets a sense that every generation thinks it is somehow immune, separate, different or special compared to any previous generations and that there is nothing that those older times could possibly teach us now. Our refusal to not see the repeating patterns of history is nothing but wilful ignorance. 

I'm only part of the way into Absurdism with Camus, as I believe it IS possible to find some meaning in the chaos if you only pay attention to the history.

Facts:

• Born 7th November 1913 in French Algeria
• Died 4th January 1960 
• Was living in Paris when the Germans invaded during WWII. 
• Unable to join the army due to his earlier tuberculosis diagnosis, so fled to Lyon, then Oran with his wife, where they taught in the local primary school.
• On medical advice he moved to the French Alps to help his tuberculosis. Started writing La Peste.
• In 1943 returned to Paris and joined the French Resistance. 
• Became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre. 
• Greatly influenced by Simone Weil. He saw her writings as an antidote to nihilism.
• Camus wrote in cycles - each cycle being a novel, an essay and a play. 
• The first cycle, Sysyphus was about the absurd (L'Étranger, Le Mythe de Sysiphe, and Caligula). 
• The second cycle, Prometheus, was revolt (La Peste (The Plague), L'Homme révolté (The Rebel), and Les Justes (The Just Assassins) 
• The third cycle was love, Nemesis (Le Premier homme (The First Man)
• My Popular Penguin Classic was translated by Robin Buss.
• Introduction by Tony Judt.
• Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
• He asks: Is it possible for humans to act in an ethical and meaningful manner, in a silent universe?
• In his notebooks, Camus suggested that the book ‘may be read in three different ways’:
• It is at the same time a tale about an epidemic; a symbol of Nazi occupation (and incidentally the prefiguration of any totalitarian regime, no matter where), and thirdly, the concrete illustration of a metaphysical problem, that of evil.

Favourite Quotes:

• There have been as many plagues in the worlds as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared.
• "This rotten bastard of a disease! Even those who don'y have it, carry it in their hearts."
• "What is true of the ills of this world is also true of the plague. It may serve to make some people great. However, when you see the suffering and the pain that it brings, you have to be mad, blind or a coward to resign yourself to the plague."
• "I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die."
• He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

Book 9 of 20 Books of Summer Winter

One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Márquez #NobelPrize

Goodness!

What a read. Or more accurately, a reread. I bought my Penguin edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude on the 3rd April 1996 in Sydney. At a guess, it must have been the Easter school holidays and I was visiting my sister, who lived in Coogee, for a few days. I cannot remember if I read it straight away, or waited until I went home. Either way, I have very little memory of reading this book, except that I found it challenging and often confusing. It was also funny and disturbing and completely different to anything I had ever read before. 

It was my very first magical realism and I wasn't sure if I liked it or not.

The huge cast of characters confused me the most. I couldn't remember who was who, with so many of the six generations sharing exactly the same names. The family tree in the front of the book only added to my confusion.

Since 1996, I've read a lot more magic realism and many more books set in South America. I've learnt that I enjoy magic realism when it is firmly embedded in the real or natural world. Ghosts, in particular, are something I can accept in a story. For me, it's simply taking the idea of being haunted by a memory to the next level. 

Dreams are another element that can carry over into the real world. We've all had those dreams that blur the lines between waking and sleeping, conscious and subconscious. But it's the mixing of the ordinary with the extraordinary that I find really exciting in magic realism. It can become a way of describing something difficult or traumatic in a palatable way - turning our troubles into a fairytale or conflict into a something beautiful and strange. It can become a way of telling our story, especially the really tough stories, by turning them into a story, that makes it possible to get out of bed every day and face another day.

Magic realism can give us hope when despair is everywhere. It mythologises our daily lives and turns us into heroes and demons. It can make sense of the chaos and it can challenge the status quo.

One Hundred Years of Solitude does all of this and more, I simply didn't appreciate that the first time around.

I underlined and asterisked so many sections that it will be impossible to pull out a favourite, but the one the sums up the book the best is,

...always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude is not an easy read or a comfortable read. At times it's overwhelming and so dense that you feel like you're brain might explode. But it is also subversive, humorous and utterly beguiling. Now, more than ever, it's important to be reminded that the world is bigger and more diverse than our Western minds and Western beliefs often take into account. There are other ways of seeing and experiencing this world we all share.

Facts:

• In Spanish - Cien Años de Soledad - 1967
• Translation by Gregory Rabassa published in 1970
• Translated into 37 languages
• Márquez was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts."
• The chapters are not numbered on purpose.
• Márquez was friends with Fidel Castro.
• “What actually strengthened our friendship were books. I discovered he was such a great reader that before publishing a book, I would send him the original. He could spot contradictions, anachronisms, and inconsistencies that even publishing professionals fail to notice. He is a very careful and voracious reader. The books he chooses to read reflect quite well the breadth of his tastes."
• Latin American Boom - 
• A common criticism of the Boom is that it is too experimental and has a "tendency toward elitism" - García Márquez who, in Benedetti's view, "represent a privileged class that had access to universal culture and were thus utterly unrepresentative of average people in Latin -America." Donald L. Shaw (1998), The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction.
• "It is no exaggeration to state that if the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution (although Cuba is not in South America) and its impact both on Latin America and the Third World generally, and secondly, the Boom in Latin American fiction, whose rise and fall coincided with the rise and fall of liberal perceptions of Cuba between 1959 and 1971." Gerald Martin (2008), Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.

First sentence:

• Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
• What a first sentence! It tells us all the main things we need to know about this story - the passing of time, the acceptance of craziness and unexpected occurrences, the guarantee of death, pathos and memory, and the promise of an entire life from beginning to end.

Gabriel García Márquez:

• Born: 6th March 1927, Aracataca, Colombia.
• Died: 17th April 2014, Mexico City, Mexico.
• Moved to Paris in 1957 -
• “What was important to me in Paris was the perspective that the city gave me on Latin America. There, I never ceased being a Caribbean, but rather I became a Caribbean conscious of his culture.”
• In 1958 he married a friend from his uni days, Mercedes Barcha.
• Nickname - Gabo.
• "The most frightful, the most unusual things are told with the deadpan expression" - McMurray, George R. (1987), Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez
• “Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..”
• "To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life." Gabriel Garcia Márquez (1982) Nobel Lecture: The Solitude of Latin America.
• "What matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it."
• “[Critics], in general, have a scripted right to pontificate, but they fail to realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is devoid of seriousness and full of nods to my most intimate friends, winks that these friends alone discover. Still, the critics claim responsibility of decoding the book, thereby covering themselves in ridicule.”
• "The world of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain." Michael Wood (1990) Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude. Cambridge University Press.
• "There is always something left to love."
• "If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already." Love in the Time of Cholera 

A huge thank you to Silvia and Ruth for hosting The One Hundred Years of Solitude readalong. It was the excuse I needed to tackle this rather unwieldy book again. I'm glad I did and now I'm ready for Love in the Tome of Cholera!

Happy Birthday Carl Spitteler!

As many of you know, I'm slowly, very slowly, making my way through the Nobel Prize winners. April is poetry month in America, so I thought I would use this opportunity to focus on one of the poets on my Nobel list.

Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler (24 April 1845 – 29 December 1924) was a Swiss poet who grew up in the area around Basle. He wrote epic, heroic poetry from a pessimistic point of view. He created his own metric system with which to write his poems.

His early working life (1871-79) was spent in Russia and Finland as a tutor to the children of General Standertskjöld. He then described his first foray into the publishing world like this:

I worked on Prometheus und Epimetheus, which, after my return to Switzerland, I published in 1881 at my own expense under the pseudonym Carl Felix Tandem. The book was completely neglected; because it was not even reviewed I abandoned all hope of making poetry my living and was compelled instead to teach school. [1]

Spitteler was awarded his 1919 Nobel Prize in 'special recognition' of his epic poem Olympischer Frühling (Olympic Spring) 1900-1905. Wikipedia describes this work as a 'powerful allegoric-epic poem, in iambic hexameters....mixing fantastic, naturalistic, religious and mythological themes'.

In 1909 he revised Olympic Spring and re-published it in five volumes. It was this edition that brought him wider recognition and praise.

• Prometheus und Epimetheus (1881)
• Extramundana (1883, seven cosmic myths)
• Schmetterlinge (Butterflies 1889)
• Der Parlamentär (1889)
• Literarische Gleichnisse (Literary Parables 1892)
• Gustav (1892)
• Balladen (1896)
• Conrad der Leutnant (1898)
• Lachende Wahrheiten (1898, essays)
• Der olympische Frühling (1900–1905, revised 1910)
• Glockenlieder (Grass and Bell Songs 1906)
• Imago (1906, novel)
• Die Mädchenfeinde (Two Little Misogynists 1907)
• Meine frühesten Erlebnisse (My Earliest Experiences 1914, biographical)
• Prometheus der Dulder (Prometheus the Suffering 1924)

A few years ago Ross @ Ross' Column posted a number of Spitteler's poems in English - thank goodness, because trying to find English translations of his work was very difficult indeed. They're not really my style but I've included two of my favourites from Ross' blog below.

A Vignette

A troop of children scales the ridge, and cries
Challenge to April skies.
"Come on! No fear!"
Hats off! This is not play;
They mean to storm high-heaven today.
It lies so near!
See how, above, it peeps through tall green grasses!

Two silver bell-notes, borne on morning breeze that passes,
Happy and careless, lightly swinging.
Come singing, ringing.
"Where lies our pathway now?"
"Above that little crowd of starry faces,
Over the hill we go
To paths that pearl-white cherry-blossom traces,"
They say - then sing, then soar
To hill, to cherry-blossoms, and are heard no more.

But what of the child-army under?
Oh, they are all gazing in wonder:
"A hedge-hog!" they say -
Heaven's safe for to-day.

A Shout of Joy

Oh what has changed my thought's defiant tread
To wing`ed ride on drifting clouds o'erhead?

Is it my view, unfettered and wide,
O'er countryside?
Is it the torrent's ringing call,
Tumbling through woods from fall to fall?
Is it the peal of sabbath bells
That clear from peaceful valley swells?
Ah, nay!
My joy has fairer feet than they.

Because this truth rings clear,
Love shall be always near;
And woman's realm, divine, yet lowly,
Is full of wonders holy;
Because my heart, in thirsting hour,
Has thy love for its princely dower.

A google search also found:

The Craftsman

Arcadian shepherds, simple goat’s milk bearing,
Offered their tribute to the wealthy Croesus.
The monarch, graciously their gift approving,
Sent them in royal litters through his Sardis,
To view its building and its mighty temples,
And all its marvel-works of human cunning.
“Great king,” they cried, quite overcome with wonder
“Who is the craftsman that has this created?”

Straightway the king led to a massive wall,
And bade them knock. No sooner said than done.
“Now listen.” They obeyed. “What hear you there?”
“Wailing and moaning of a myriad voices.”
“You understand?” “Alas, O king, we fail to.”
“That was the craftman,” answered lordly Coesus.

So, now we know a little more about the Nobel Laureate from 1919.
[1] Nobel Prize Biography page.

Sully Prudhomme - Poet

I'm (very) slowly making my way through the Nobel Prize winners. Reading the Nobel's hasn't been as enlightening as I had first hoped. I'm still trying to work out why. So I thought I'd start at the very beginning to see if that helps.

It turns out that Alfred Nobel's family contested his will after he died in 1895. They were very unhappy that he had left most of his wealth to the establishment of the prize. It took five years for the issue to be resolved and the prizes awarded.

Alfred Nobel's will:

dictates that his entire remaining estate should be used to endow "prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind."

...one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.

 Sully Prudhomme was the very first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1901.

He received the award,

in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect.

Sully Prudhomme has an introvert nature as sensitive as it is delicate. His poetry is rarely concerned with images and exterior situations as such, but principally with the extent to which they can serve as a mirror of poetic contemplation. The love of the spiritual, his doubts, his sorrows, which nothing earthly can dissipate, are the usual subjects of his work which, in its finished form and sculptural beauty, suffers no useless word. His poetry appears in exuberant colours and only rarely takes on the character of melodious music; but it is all the more plastic in the creation of forms suited to expressing feelings and ideas. Noble, profoundly pensive, and turned toward sadness, his soul reveals itself in this poetry, tender yet not sentimental - a sorrowful analysis which inspires a melancholy sympathy in the reader.

The Swedish Academy has been less attracted by his didactic or abstract poems than by his smaller lyric compositions, which are full of feeling and contemplation, and which charm by their nobility and dignity and by the extremely rare union of delicate reflection and rich sentiment.

Enough said!
Here are three of his poems and you can decide for yourself.

BESIDE THE WATER

The sound of bank and water is all I hear,
The sad resignation of a weeping spring
Or a rock that hourly sheds a tear,
And the birch leaves' vague quivering.

I do not see the river bear the boat along
The flowering shore flits past, and I remain;
And in the watery depths that I skim,
The reflected blue sky flutters like a curtain.

Meandering in their sleep, you might say the waters
Waver, no longer sure where the bank lies:
And the flower thrown in hesitates to choose.
And like this flower, all that man desires
Can settle on the river of my life,
Without teaching me which way my wishes lie.

BROKEN VASE

The vase where this verbena is dying
was cracked by a blow from a fan.
It must have barely brushed it,
for it made no sound.

But the slight wound,
biting into the crystal day by day,
surely, invisibly crept
slowly all around it.

The clear water leaked out drop by drop.
The flowers' sap was exhausted.
Still no one suspected anything.
Don't touch! It's broken.

Thus often does the hand we love,
barely touching the heart, wound it.
Then the heart cracks by itself
and the flower of its love dies.

Still intact in the eyes of the world,
it feels its wound, narrow and deep,
grow and softly cry.
It's broken. Don't touch!

NEVER TO SEE OF HEAR HER

Never to see or hear her,
never to name her aloud,
but faithfully always to wait for her
and love her.

To open my arms and, tired of waiting,
to close them on nothing,
but still always to stretch them out to her
and to love her.

To only be able to stretch them out to her,
and then to be consumed in tears,
but always to shed these tears,
always to love her.

Never to see or hear her,
never to name her aloud,
but with a love that grows ever more tender,
always to love her. Always!


Rene Francois Armand (Sully) Prudhomme was born in Paris in 1839 and died there, after a long period of ill health, in 1907. He originally studied to be a engineer, and briefly worked in a solicitor's office, but eventually turned to philosophy and poetry. He intended to create scientific poetry to suit modern life.

He was part of the Parnassian school of writing which arose in reaction to the excess emotions at work in the Romantic movement. Parnassian's represented restraint, objectivity and precise wording. Technical perfection was the aim; elegance and balance the objectives.

Just Saying...

...that I, for one, am thrilled and delighted that Kazuo Ishiguro has been named this year's Nobel Prize for Literature recipient.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017 was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".

I loved and adored The Buried Giant in 2015 and The Remains of the Day is one of my favourite reads from 15 years ago. 

Never Let Me Know was one that I felt rather more ambivalent about but I have high hopes for Nocturnes, An Artist of the Floating World and The Unconsoled on my TBR pile.

The Guardian's article about Ishiguro's win is here, Japan Times here and NY Times here.

#justsaying

Nelly Sachs - Poet & Nobel Laureate

Nelly Sachs was born on the 10th December 1891 in Schoneberg, an affluent area of Berlin, to a wealthy Jewish German family.
She grew up in a very protective family.
Mental health issues affected her throughout her life in the form of hallucinations, paranoia, mutism and various other breakdowns.
She spent a number of years in mental institutions, but always found a way to continue to write.

Nelly 1910

As a young girl she became fascinated with the works of the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, Selma Lagerlof and began a correspondence with her.

Sachs also became good friends with Hilde Domin (Palm), a German poet who emigrated to Italy in 1932 with her husband, then finally, to the Dominican Republic in 1940, to avoid the 'Nazi menace'.

Sachs fled Nazi Germany with the help of Lagerlof, on the last flight to Sweden in 1940.
She took her aged mother with her, but sadly, both her mother and Lagerlof died soon after.
Nelly became a Swedish citizen in 1952.

Her poetry is described as being lyrical and mystical.
Her early work was influenced by German Romanticism, Christian imagery and an early, unhappy relationship with a non-Jewish man.

He was later killed in a concentration camp.
When Sach's learnt of his death, her poetry evolved in a way that

"bound up his fate with that of her people and wrote many love lyrics ending not only in the beloved's death, but in the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Sachs herself mourns no longer as a jilted lover but as a personification of the Jewish people in their vexed relationship to history and God.

Sachs' fusion of grief with subtly romantic elements...allowed her to develop 

self-consciously from a German to a Jewish writer, with a corresponding change in her language: still flowery and conventional in some of her first poetry on the Holocaust, it becomes ever more compressed and surreal."

(wikipedia)

She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966 along with Shmuel Yosef Agnon.

The Academy stated that

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1966 was divided equally between Shmuel Yosef Agnon 

"for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people" and Nelly Sachs "for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel's destiny with touching strength".

Sachs observed that Agnon represented Israel whereas "I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people".'
(wikipedia)

Her later poetry explored an eclectic religious transcendentalism.
Sin, vulnerability, suffering, redemption, rebirth, grace and peace were some of her recurring themes.
Her poems regularly referenced earlier pieces (metafiction again!) which caused some commentators to say that she only ever wrote one poem, with numerous components.

I certainly struggle to understand all the layers of imagery in the few poems I've read so far.
Perhaps Sachs needs to be read in her entirety, in chronological order?

 Sachs died of cancer on the 12th May 1970 in Sweden.

You've Lost Your Name

You’ve lost your name

but the world rushes up

and offers you a grand choice

You shake your head

yet your beloved

once found you the needle in the haystack

Hark: he’s calling you now

Translation Catherine @Beauty for Ashes

Whoever Comes from the Earth

Whoever

comes from the Earth

reaching for the moon

or

other heavenly mineral flower –

will soar high

wounded by blasts

of memory

shot from the explosive burst of yearning

for

out of Earth’s painted night

his winged prayers arise

out of daily destructions

seeking the inner pathways of the eyes. Craters and arid seas

filled with tears

travelling through starry stations

escaping from dust and ashes. Everywhere the Earth

is building its colonies of homesickness.

Not to land

on the oceans of addicted blood

only to sway

in the luminous music of ebb and flood

only to sway

to the rhythm of the unscathed

mark of eternity:

life – death –

Translation by Catherine @Beauty for Ashes

O The Chimneys

Job 19:26
“And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God"

O the chimneys
on the carefully planned dwellings of death
When Israel’s body rose dissolved in smoke
through the air –
To be welcomed by a chimney sweep star
Turned black
Or was it a ray of the sun?

O the chimneys!

Paths of freedom for the dust of Jeremiah and Job –

Who dreamed you up and built stone upon stone

The path of smoke for their flight?

O dwellings of death

Set out so enticingly

For the host of the house, who used to be the guest – 

 O you fingers

Laying the stone of the threshold

Like a knife between life and death –

O you chimneys

O you fingers

And Israel’s body dissolves in smoke through the air!

Translation by Catherine @Beauty for Ashes

Nelly Sachs by Helga Tiemann, 1968

Always

Always

where children die

the quietest things become homeless.

Sunsets wrapped in a mantle of pain

where the dark soul of the blackbird

laments the approach of the night –

soft winds wafting

over trembling grasses

dousing the ruins of light

and sowing death – 

 Always

where children die

the firefaces of the night

burn up in their lonely secret –

and who knows of the signposts

death sends out:

scent of the tree of life,

cockcrow shortening the day

magic clock bewitched into the nurseries

by the grey horror of autumn –

waters rippling on the shores of dark

the rushing, tugging sleep of time – 

 Always

where children die

the mirrors of their doll’s houses

are hung with a breath,

seeing no more the dance of the

finger puppets

dressed in satin of children’s blood;

a dance that stands still

like a far-off moonworld

in a telescope 

 Always

where children die

stone and star

and so many dreams become homeless.

Translation by Catherine @Beauty for Ashes

Bewitched indeed!

Bewildered as well.

Poetry appreciation doesn't come naturally to me.

It's a learned process.

I feel like she's writing way above my level to understand.

I feel her poems rather then understand them.

The Nobel Prize states

The fate of the Jewish people casts a dark shadow over the 20th century. It is also the basis for Nelly Sachs' literary works. She borrows subjects for her poetry from the Jewish beliefs and mysticism, but her authorship is also strongly coloured by Nazi persecution of the Jews, with the horrors of the death camps as its ultimate expression. Nelly Sachs' poetry combines echoes from the poetry of ancient religious texts with modernist language.

The Nelly Sachs website has a number of her poems in German and English which I used as a starting point. 

I also found a wonderful blog hosted by Catherine @Beauty for Ashes.
She is gradually translating Sach's poems into English and welcomes commentary and discussion about interpretation. 

Catherine kindly gave me permission to use four of her translations above.

Please take the time to visit her page (she has the original poem plus her translation on each post). 

It is truly an extraordinary thing she is doing to bring Sach's work to a wider audience.

The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

The Home and the World is a classic of Indian literature published in 1916 by Rabindranath Tagore. It was translated into English in 1919 by his nephew Surendranath Tagore.

For a summary of the book, details about Tagore's life and fascinating personal insights about life in India now, please see Cirtnecce's fabulous wrap up post here.

Truth is the big theme that runs throughout The Home and the World.

Whose truth is truer? Can truth be manipulated? Is there a universal truth?  Does truth equal right?

Tagore explores all these themes via his characters beliefs and actions during the Swadeshi movement in the early 1900's in Bengal.

The Swadeshi movement was a direct result of Lord Curzon's division of Bengal in 1905 which was part of the British 'divide and rule' policy in India (and in other countries all around the world that all still suffer the consequences of this meddling to this day).

The Swadeshi movement involved a boycott of all British goods in favour of locally produced crafts and industry.

Tagore supported this movement until violence began to creep into it. As with many causes that start for good reasons, dubious leadership and people with their own agendas to run, quickly turned the movement into one of mass looting and burning (of foreign goods).

Those that suffered the most were the poor peasants and traders who had all their wares destroyed with no compensation forthcoming and who could then, not afford the more expensive, and usually shoddily made, locally produced goods.

The self-righteous truth of the wealthy Hindu landowners and intellectuals soon became a living nightmare for the poor Muslim families suddenly without livelihood, income, shelter or anyone to turn to for help.

And so the crushing wheel of history rolled on.

In The Home and the World Tagore brings these struggles into the lives of his three main characters.

Bimala's struggle with the truth is a struggle with her two sides (or between the two very different men in her life):

There must be two different persons inside men. One of these in me can understand that Sandip is trying to delude me; the other is content to be deluded.

Sandip is such an adept in setting music to his chant of praise that I cannot argue; I lose my power of seeing truth; my sight is clouded over like an opium-eater's eyes.

Nikhil's lessons in truth are hard won and based on observation:

I longed to find Bimala blossoming fully in all her truth and power. But the thing I forgot to calculate was, that one must give up all claims based on conventional rights, if one would find a person freely revealed in truth.

I have seen from our boyhood what a juggler with ideas is Sandip. He has no interest in discovering truth....But those who deal in delusion end by deluding themselves, and I fully believe that, each time Sandip creates a new fallacy, he persuades himself that he has found the truth, however contradictory his creations may be to one another. 

Sandip's truth is that of the manipulator out to serve his own needs:

The truth we must build up will require a great deal of untruth in the process. 

The primary difference and tension between Sandip and Nikhil is summed up with this conversation,

'I only seek the result,' said I (Sandip), 'which belongs to today.'

'The result I seek,' answered Nikhil.'belongs to all time.'

In many, many ways, The Home and the World is an example of the age old story of youth - full of vigour and arrogance that theirs is the new age, that right is one their side simply because they are young right here and now, versus the more circumspect, mature, experienced older man of the world who has had time to work through all the disillusions of youth and to realise that the world is a much bigger and far more nuanced place than any twenty two year old could possibly conceive or imagine. And that life is so much more and so much longer than what seems to burn so brightly at twenty two.

Sandip describes the arrogant, youthful view of history and life very clearly with these words:

We are men, we are kings, we must have our tribute. Ever since we have come upon the Earth we have been plundering her; and the more we claimed, the more she submitted. From primeval days have we men been plucking fruits, cutting down trees, digging up the soil, killing beast, bird and fish. From the bottom of the sea, from underneath the ground, from the very jaws of death, it has all been grabbing and grabbing and grabbing - no strong-box in Nature's storeroom has been respected of left unrifled.

The one delight of the Earth is to fulfill the claims of those who are men. She has been made fertile and beautiful and complete through her endless sacrifices to them. But for this, she would lost in the wilderness, not knowing herself, the doors of her heart shut, her diamonds and pearls never seeing the light.

Likewise, by sheer force of our claims, we men have opend up all the latent possibilities of women. In the process of surrendering themselves to us, they have gained their true greatness. Because they had to bring all the diamonds of their happiness and the pearls of their sorrow into our royal treasury, they have found their tru wealth. So for men to accept is truly to give: for women to give is truly to gain.

This level of arrogance and self-delusion is incapable of rational thought or logical debate. It is also incapable of seeing things from another's perspective. It is all about the self and justifying their own actions and getting what they want now.

In it one can also see the seeds of climate change denial and anti-feminist rhetoric.

Tagore is also of his time and by the end of the book he is clearly on the side of there being a higher form of universal truth imbued with a moral imperative that is a bit more right and true than anything else on offer. In other words, Nikhil's view of the world.

It's a view of the world that is more balanced and rational and thoughtful than Sandip's, but it still assumes that there is some kind of universal truth that oversees us all and that fits us all the same way.

However that is a more modern discussion that still has no clear solution in sight.

There is plenty more to say about this book, many more themes and ideas to explore, so please feel free to pose, provoke and question in the comments below or over at Cirtnecce @Mockingbirds, Looking Glasses and Prejudices, who hosted the readalong for this book.

19/20 books of summer (winter)

The Home and the World Read Along

I wasn't sure I was going to make it in time to join in this wonderful The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore readalong being hosted by Cirtnecce @ Mockingbirds, Looking Glasses and Prejudices during August.

I've been reading a couple of books this past week or so and I was determined to finish them before starting any more books. I was also keen to finish my 20 books of Summer (winter) challenge.

I finished the books last night. And today, I realised that my 20 books of summer challenge should work FOR me not against me. I'll just change one of the unread books on my list for this one and everyone will be happy!

Cirtnecce states in her sign up post,

In the year of 1916, exactly 100 years ago, 3 years since he became the first Non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore, one of the most prolific artistic geniuses to come from India, published his extremely controversial and then much contested The Home and The World. It was a book that broke the mould and brought out women from the “anter mahal” (the inner chambers where women led secluded lives in 18th-19th century Bengal, albeit with consequences) and put a spin on on the Indian National Movement by defining and defying at the same time what a true patriot is/was.

She has also taken the time to present a three part potted history of India here to help us understand the world and time in which this book takes place.

My edition is a 2005 Penguin Classics.

The translation is Surendranath Tagore's 1919 version.

Surendranath was Rabindranath's nephew and they worked together to produce this translation.

The original title was called Ghare Baire.

When Bimala's husband, Nikhil - a wealthy yet enlightened and charitable Bengali landowner - encourages her to emerge from the traditional female seclusion of purdah, he introduces her to his old friend, Sandip. Rutheless and charismatic, Sandip is a radical leader in the nationalist Swadeshi movement, and Bimbala is soon caught up by his revolutionary fervour and expereiences a profound political awakening. 

Torn between her duties as a wife and a passion for her cause, her attempts to resolve the conflict between home and world lead to violence and, ultimately, tragedy. Vividly depicting  the clash between old and new, realism and idealism, The Home and the World (1916) is a haunting allegory of India's political turmoil in the early twentieth century. 

This edition includes an introduction by Anita Desai, while William Radice's new preface examines its critical reception, Tagore's modernism and the relationship between Surendranath Tagore's translation and the Bengali text. 

It's never too late to jump on board a readalong! Especially when the book is only 200 pages long.

Catherine Certitude by Patrick Modiano

You know that something special is coming your way when you start noting down & highlighting quotable lines on page one of a new book.

The story begins in New York. Catherine is an elderly woman watching her daughter teach a dance class. She notices a young girl wearing glasses. The young girl carefully places her glasses on the chair to dance. Instantly, Catherine is transported back to her own glasses-wearing childhood.

Without my glasses, the world lost its roughness and became as soft and downy as the big pillow I used to lean my cheek against before going to sleep.

When I wore my glasses I saw the world as it was. I couldn't dream any more. 

I loved how this one paragraph told me that this was going to be a book about perception & memory - my favourite bookish themes.

Catherine Certitude is by the Nobel Prize in Literature 2014 winner, Patrick Modiano.

It was first published in 1988 in France.
This lovely hardback edition, translated by William Rodarmor & illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempe, was recently published in the UK through Andersen Press.

It's a curious tale with more adult appeal I feel, than the early reader picture book that it looks like from the outside. The cover declares that it's a love letter to Paris, but it feels more like a loving homage to a father/daughter relationship. Full of tenderness & nuances, Catherine Certitude highlights all the special little understandings that exist in any strong bond.

Catherine now runs a ballet school in New York, but this is the story of her childhood in Paris:

Only one thing in my life is out of the ordinary: before we came to America, I spent my childhood in Paris, in a neighbourhood off the 10th arrondissement. 

One of the few things I knew about Modiano from all the publicity last year was that he had had a difficult childhood and that his stories were concerned with memory, history, identity and the complexities of choice.

I was therefore, even more curious about Catherine's story - was this a wish fulfillment tale about his own childhood or perhaps a story about his relationship with his two daughters?

Modiano's work is haunted by what he says was a cold upbringing, creating the impression of a long letter to his parents. (The Local)

Catherine Certitude leaves us with many unsolved mysteries. Why did the mother leave them in Paris? What were Mr Certitude's shady dealings? Why did he emigrate to France?

There are all sorts of signposts from Modiano's own life - the cold, unavailable mother and a father engaged in dodgy collaborations. Yet, it is clear that this father and daughter are very close. Tolerant and supportive of each other's dreams and foibles:

We always stay the same and the people we have been in the past go on living until the end of time.

Catherine Certitude is Modiano's only children's book, but I for one, will be reading more of his adult work to explore his "art of memory" (Nobel Prize committee).

The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968 "for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind"

He was born in 1899 in Osaka, Japan and died April 1972.

His work has been described as "lyrical, subtly-shaded prose" by Wikipedia.
"The novel may be interpreted as a meditation upon aging and its attendant decline, and the coming to terms with one's mortality that is its hallmark."

Literature in Translation says:  

Perhaps the Kawabata novel that demystifies Japanese culture the most is The Sound of the Mountain (1954)—which has occasionally been singled out as Kawabata’s masterpiece. 

Although The Sound of the Mountain features powerful flights of description, it also abounds in prosaic details. The main character is an elderly businessman who has become emotionally distant from his family, and this novel can be read as a commentary on the passing of an older Japanese generation. You can also check out the rave reviews for The Sound of the Mountain on Good Reads.

However, I cannot, in all faith offer up a rave review here.

Maybe I wasn't in the mood for a slow, gentle story about aging and family tensions?

Jean @Howling Frog was feeling underwhelmed last time we checked in too. 
Her comment resonated with me as I struggled to care about Shingo and his dysfunctional family. 

I normally like a good introspective book. And I love reading about dysfunctional families! I also believe I'm intelligent enough to appreciate and enjoy subtle & culturally sensitive, nuanced writing. 
In fact, it was the cultural references and descriptions of nature that I found the most touching and interesting.


Thanks to my Japanese studies at school I understood the complexities and rituals behind some of them, but quite a few slid by me as well. 

Only one compelled me to research it. 

On pg 67 we come across this evocative passage...

The puppy got up as if nothing had happened, and, after standing there blockishly for a second or two, walked off sniffing at the earth.

"What is it?" He felt that he was seeing the pose for the first time, and that he had seen exactly that pose before. he thought for a moment.

"That's it. The Sotatsu painting," he muttered. "Remarkable."

Shingo had glanced at Sotatsu's ink painting of a puppy, and had though it altogether stylized, like a toy; and now he was astonished to see it reproduced in life. The dignity and elegance of the black puppy was exactly like the Sotatsu.

I was taken with this vignette, having had such moments in my own life. 
This time around, though, it was my personal image that predominated. 
I was unfamiliar with this artist and this piece of work (Puppy and Grass). 
Imagine my delight, when I googled it and spotted the picture straight away as being the one that matched the picture in my mind!

This book counts towards my Around the World Challenge with Giraffe Days.

I read The Sound of the Mountain as part of the Classics Club Dare. 

Now that I have finished my dare book, I challenge my fellow Clubbers to read Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner.

This dare is purely selfish. I read and loved Crossing to Safety 18 months ago and have been wanting a good excuse to read another Stegner book. This is it!

The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee

I have no idea what I'm going to say about this book.

I finished it on Sunday night but I'm not sure if I can tell you what it was about, because I'm still trying to work it out for myself!

This book reminds me of Possession by A.S. Byatt in that I know enough to know that I missed half the allusions and references embedded in the story.

I felt like I got most of the Christian references - Coetzee's take on no room at the inn, the virgin birth, turn the other cheek, loaves and fishes, the trinity - were chortle out loud moments for me. 
But were they meant to be?

Were we in heaven? Maybe it was some kind of dystopian/utopian Spain? Or just some kind of literary made up novel world?

David was one of the most annoying children I've ever met. He was arrogant, petulant, naïve, attention-seeking and demanding. A spoilt brat.

Despite such oddness, or maybe because of it, I still found The Childhood of Jesus utterly compelling and thought provoking. I basically read it in three sittings.

The chaos and uncertainty of 'where are we, what's going on?' kept me riveted. 

The philosophising stevedores were adorable and annoying at the same time. The bland, passionless world became more frightening as the story progressed.

I give you one paragraph (from one of the philosophising stevedores) that for me sums up some of the layers of this story...about the nature of the novel, what is real and how we know if something is real or not...

Consider now history. If history, like climate were a higher reality, then history would have manifestations which we would be able to feel through our senses. But where are these manifestations?' He looks around. 'Which of us has ever had his cap blown off by history?' There is silence. 'No one. Because history has no manifestations. Because history is not real. Because history is just a made-up story.

This will no doubt become one of those love it or hate it books.
Curiously, it looks like I will be falling into the love camp.

(We now claim Coetzee as one of our own. He moved to Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006. We're cheeky buggers like that!)