Indelibly shaped by his experience in Auschwitz, also by how he arrived there and made his way back to home, Turin, Italy, Primo Levi, a professional Indelibly shaped by his experience in Auschwitz, also by how he arrived there and made his way back to home, Turin, Italy, Primo Levi, a professional chemist who seemingly willed himself to become the most insightful of writers, embraced his memories to deepen and articulate timeless truths and insights in ways that any reader could understand to apply to their own lives.
What little I previously knew of Levi was based on commentary of his first book, his autobiographical remembrance of surviving Auschwitz. I mistakenly thought that his writing focused on the Holocaust. It does, but it expands into all the things that inspire him, a survivor, a chemist, a philosopher, a historian, an Italian, a Jew, a husband, a speculator that somewhat distills into science fiction. He was indeed, as was often said about the music of Duke Ellington, beyond category as was confirmed in the first of the interpretive essays concluding the works, Primo Levi in America , which describes the long road of getting Levi’s writing in front of a larger American audience. Largely ignored up until the early 1980s, The Periodic Table “had been rejected by more than twenty American publishers.” A literary critic who tried to champion it remembered, “some told me it was not a good chemistry book, while others told me that there was too much chemistry for the book to be a personal memoir.” Another agent who had purchased the rights to seven of Levi’s books recalled,
When I presented If Not Now, When?, I stood up to say that I had a book about the Holocaust, and sales estimates shrank. When I said it was written in Italian, they shrank even further, and even more so when I said that it was literary. I had to tell people that there are just some books that are in no category, Jewish or otherwise, that they are just great books, and this is how I represented it in America.”
When Saul Bellow read The Periodic Table for the first time, he remarked, “It is wonderfully pure.” It was only by April 1984 that Levi “finally achieved the commercial success that had previously eluded” him. Sadly, he only experienced it for three years. He died on April 11, 1987, the coroner ruling it death by suicide, but whether this is true is still unclear today. I have listed the volumes backwards below, because the final volume make everything that came before as profound as anything I have read in my life.
Volume Three
Collected Poems
Poems authored by one who admits to not being a poet is probably shouldn’t be reviewed by one who rarely reads poetry. I did, however, get a lot out of them. The poems from the fifties are still mostly reflective of his time before, during and after Auschwitz. After that, they are more about the things he observes every day in Turin, either at leisure or at work. Excerpt from essay on Rudolf Höss:
Serving in the SS included an intensive and skillful “reeducation” that flattered the recruits’ ambition. These, mostly ignorant, frustrated outcasts felt valued and exalted. The uniform was elegant, the pay was good, the power almost limitless impunity guaranteed…Höss and his deputy have the bright idea of trying Zyklon B, the poison used to kill rats and roaches, and that works well. After a test carried out on nine hundred Russian prisoners, Höss feels “greatly encouraged”: the mass execution is successful, in terms of both quantity and quality – no blood, no traumas. There is a fundamental difference between machine-gunning naked people at the edge of a ditch they have dug themselves and throwing a little box of poison in an air duct…
And a final one that should make us all think about our public priorities:
Obviously, the year of the child [1979] originated in a widespread feeling of guilt, in the awareness that to this day, even in the most advanced countries there is no feeling of reverence toward children, as prescribed by the Gospels, and that adults are preparing, for today’s children, a future full of shadows. And yet love for children is inscribed in us; the proximity of child, even an unknown child, makes us responsible, brings us joy, strength and peace of mind.
Other People’s Trades
This book is a collection of commentaries Levi wrote over a thirty years for the Turin newspaper La Stampa. I’ll keep it short and sweet. Sort of like every piece in it, some of the best, most profound writing I have ever read. Eclectic topics – personal “dilettantism” as Levi summarizes them – each filled with a chemist’s (Levi’s profession) precise insight, with one potential epigram after another for aspiring writers. I feel as though I could write volumes trying to describe and interpret them. But it wouldn’t come close to being in the same vicinity of each piece. It was worth reading a couple thousand pages to get here. Is my love of this book clear yet?
Stories and Essays
Anne Milano Appel’s introduction of the Translator’s Afterword of this short anthology best sums up my feelings about it and the preceding piece, which was so profound I couldn’t find the words to express my heartfelt love and admiration of Levi’s late, short writings. “I came to Levi’s Stories and Essays having only read his more sobering works. So when I read the Stories it was like meeting an old friend after a long time and being surprised by aspects of him that I hadn’t noticed. What struck me as the most refreshing was the playfulness and whimsy I found in some of the pieces I found – so very different from the Lager encounters – along with a touching humility.” Touching, playfulness, whimsy, refreshing – perfect descriptions – but the experience of the Auschwitz Lagers is never far away, even if never mentioned.
One of the best examples of rascal in Levi is the fictional trademark “patent application” submitted in the “Grand Duchy of Neustria” for the “PARACHRONO,” an invention that alters perceptions of time, for example:
A night spent in a state of insomnia is longer than a night spent sleeping, though up to now, as far as I know, no quantitative research has been carried out. As everyone knows, subjective time lengthens enormously if clocks or chronometers are consulted frequently.
The PARACHRONO is “A method of accelerating, slowing down, or arresting the subjective time of a subject.” Prisoners would perceive a long sentence as a blink of any eye, one could watch mushrooms “literally grow before my eyes,” and extend the length of an experience orgasm as long as desired.
Just a few pages later, in The Commander of Auschwitz, an essay about Rudolf Höss, the commander of the concentration camp when Levi was there, he writes:
He belongs to the most dangerous human species of this century. If you consider it, without men like him, without the Hösses, the Eichmans, the Kesselrings, and the thousand other loyal, blind men who carried out orders, the savage beasts, Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, would have been impotent and disarmed. Their names would not figure in history; they would have passed like shadowy meteors through Europe’s dark sky. Instead, the opposite occurred: as history has shown us, the seed sown by these dark apostles took deep root in Germany, in all classes, with alarming speed, and led to a proliferation of hatred that continues to poison Europe and the world today.
If only Levi were alive today to tell such truths about the Idiot, the American symbol of global fascism. As horrible as he is, it’s his minions that scare me. They live around me, they smile with thumbs up over the graves of relatives buried in the most sacred cemetery in the nation, they thrive under the incompetence of a lazy, profit-driven press. The proliferation of poison is reemerging globally and we have no Primo Levi to point out its toxic absurdity.
The Drowned and the Saved
Levi’s last book, published months before his death, should be read together with his first, If This Is A Man. This collection of essays are his philosophical reflections about the meaning of the death camps, both then and for contemporary life. The essay Shame is the highlight. Every sentence reads like an epigraph. This paragraph from the final essay, however, is a prescient call to us and eternity:
It can happen anywhere. I do not mean nor can I say that it will happen. As I’ve noted, it’s unlikely that all the factors that triggered the Nazi madness could occur again, and simultaneously. But some precursory signs are appearing. Violence, “useful” or “useless,” is before our eyes. It is spreading, through sporadic private incidents and government lawlessness, in the two areas customarily known as the first and the second worlds, that is to say, in parliamentary democracies and Communist-bloc countries. In the Third World it is endemic or epidemic. All that is needed is a new two-bit actor (there is no shortage of candidates) to mobilize the violence, legalize it, declare it necessary and just, and infect the world with it. Few countries can be guaranteed immunity from a future wave of violence generated by intolerance, lust for power, economic claims, religious or political fanaticism, or racial friction. We thus need to sharpen our senses and distrust the prophets, the charismatics, the persons who speak and write “fancy words” without the backing of sound reasons.
Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981-1987
Wide-ranging until the end. Essays reflecting on the meaning of the Holocaust—often contains in introduction to other books and translated editions of his own. Unbelievably humorous and insightful “interviews” between a journalist and a seagull, an e. coli bacteria, and a giraffe, comparing how paint dries with a spider that immediately turns liquid into web strings which harden by friction at the point it leaves the body, and an insightful essay on cells explaining why thalidomide’s tragedy could have been averted if its discoverers had known a little more about chemistry.
Volume Two:
The Periodic Table
Reading summaries on Amazon and Goodreads, one would be led to believe that this is an autobiographical work and an “an impassioned response to the Holocaust.” Don’t let those descriptions fool you. Some do, but this is a collection of short stories, reminiscences, speculations, and most of all, tangents. There is no guiding theme other than the naming of each chapter after a chemical element, each with profound sociopolitical commentary:
This Bortolasso was a middle-aged laborer, strong as a mule and dirty as a boar. He couldn’t have been a pure idiot: it’s more likely that he belonged to that human type of which it’s said in Piedmont that they play the fool in order not to pay taxes. Sheltered by the immunity granted to the weak of mind, Bortolasso performed his job as a gardener with extreme negligence. It was a negligence that bordered on a primitive astuteness: all right, the world had declared him irresponsible, no it must put up with him as such, in fact provide for and take care of him.
Most endearing is a story about a prehistoric wanderer with a gift of finding and manipulating lead, sharing it during his travels. The most autobiographical story is about being in Italy after Mussolini fell and before Levi was sent to Auschwitz, describing the effects of fascism, a timely lesson for today:
To write melancholy, crepuscular poems, and not even very good ones, while the world was in flames, seemed to us neither strange nor shameful: we proclaimed ourselves enemies of fascism, but in fact fascism had worked in us, as in almost all Italians, alienating us and making us superficial, passive, and cynical.And his thoughts about what the administrative, bureaucratic trivialities of working do to us, often without our cognition, become literary:
…at that time I hadn’t yet become acquainted with the frightening anesthetic power of company papers, their capacity to hamper, muffle, blunt every flash of intuition and every spark of intelligence.As one who never really “got” science, Levi goes on to write with a passion about chemistry, had I been exposed to it as a young person, still wouldn’t have led me to study science, but it would have sparked a respect for the beauty and poetry behind it.
The Wrench
I was into four stories of this collection before figuring out what was going on. As the translator explains in his summary notes, these stories are about work,
Work is fiction’s greatest blind spot. Work occupies more of our hours than sleep, love, and family, yet it’s rare to find a novel that takes as its main subject the daily routines, obligations and petty indignities that consume most of our lives…The earliest novels, written by people wealthy enough not to have to work, tended to be about the lives of people wealthy enough not to have to work. The subject of work has been largely avoided ever since…
This is a fun collection, mostly consisting of extended monologues of his colleague, a construction specialist who gets to travel the world. I get the sense that Levi used this as a writing exercise, to force himself within certain literary constraints. Not classic literature, but very interesting.
Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949-1980
More of a Auschwitz-focused collection, although that’s the wrong description for uncollected stories and essays. It seems many of the later pieces are written for a regular column Levi had in La Stampa, a Turinese newspaper. Refuting and expressing exasperation about a growing denialism of the Holocaust itself, which had a moment in the late 1970s/early 1980s, became an overriding theme. And surely, fewer readers associated him with the writer of short stories about science fiction, work, or growing up. These are a great way to see a less practiced and edited Levi.
Lilith and Other Stories
One of the many beauties of these collected works is seeing the writer, Primo Levi, desperately trying to carve his identity apart from Primo Levi, the man. And I think there are two major parts to this writer. One, like the unwelcome wedding guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, feels compelled by history and responsibility to share both his experiences and insights, either through essays or episodic short stories. The other has no rules; he wants to share his fascination of chemistry, people he knows or experiences he has, and see where his speculations take him. This one is not bound by any duty other than that of the writer. This is a broad sampler of how Levi’s intellect was both wide and articulate.
If Not Now, When?
”Come to think of it, you look Jewish, too. We’ve seen some strange things, but this beats them all: a band of Jews wandering around Poland with weapons stolen from the Poles, passing themselves off as partisans, the sons of bitches!”
How is it possible that this, Levi’s only novel, has never come to my attention before? That it hasn’t been made into a movie? Perhaps because it was published in the early 1980s. Had it been in the 1960s, it would have fit in nicely with WWII-themed movies of the decade; Richard Burton or Clint Eastwood and a bunch of other stock actors come to mind. And it’s a story that few know about. Small gangs of partisans fighting invading Nazis and collaborating locals. In this case it’s in the closing year of the war and the first months of peace and an amalgamation of Jews as they make their way from Russia to Italy in hopes of one day making it to Palestine.
Along the way they link and separate with other groups, experience tragedies, minor triumphs, the foibles of human relationships before finally making their way to an empty rail car to take the thirty-or-so survivors to Italy. Having been forced to fight and live beyond the margins of society for years, assimilating to normalcy can only be achieved by arriving in Palestine. We are confident that they will, although it will be a different type of struggle awaiting them.
Volume One:
If This Is a Man
Levi's account of being torn from Turin and eventually ending up in one of Auschwitz's satellite camps is preferable to be to most of the first-person narratives coming out of this era. I find it especially more enlightening than, for example, Elie Wiesel's Night. Levi describes what happened to him and him alone. He does not speculate or draw vast conclusions about humanity. His is an account of the grim day-to-day realities of life in the camp. He describes only what he sees and experiences. And frankly, even that, at times, is almost too much for the reader to bear. All in all, one of the more satisfying, if that is the right word, and enlightening works of concentration camp literature.
The Truce
Picking up from the liberation of Auschwitz, Levi recounts the roundabout, frustrating, and illogical trip back to Turin. Mostly forgotten among the stories of the liberation of concentration camps are the stories of what actually happened to the those freed. Many had the "rationality" of be being shuttled to and resettled through displacement (DP)camps. Most were left to their own devices and efforts, and the struggle to survive was as disconcerting and unsettling as life in the camps. Many died anonymous deaths, some never made it home, making do with what fate offers. Others lived by their wits and survived individual odysseys worthy of mythology before reaching destinations of anti-climactic normalcy. An understated classic.
Natural Histories
More science than fiction from the perspective of the early 21st century. Most stories revolve around a salesman in Italy who works for an American firm based in Oklahoma, which invent and manufacture machines, like one that makes copies of anything. A coworker modifies it, making a perfect copy of his wife, which leads to many problems, but not as one might first imagine. The gadgets disturb life, making the reader wonder if they are curses, but become part of the fabric of personal and social lives.
Flaw of Form
Picking up themes from the previous collection about changing technologies and their impact on individuals and society. These are somehow deeper, some written from the perspective of civilizations, both terrestrial and beyond, creating social commentary with questions to be applied to any era. Some require repeated readings, not for their complexity, but to grasp their deep profundity....more
There’s no group more practical, more cynical, more inclined to resolve everything by murder than the privileged plebeians who float to the surface
There’s no group more practical, more cynical, more inclined to resolve everything by murder than the privileged plebeians who float to the surface at the end of revolutions, when the lava has hardened over the fire, when everybody’s revolution turns into the counter-revolution of a few against everybody. It forms a new petty-bourgeoisie with itching palms which doesn’t know the meaning of the word conscience, doesn’t give a damn about what it doesn’t know, lives on, lives on steel springs and steel slogans, and knows perfectly well it stole the old flag from us. It is ferocious and base. We were implacable in order to change the world; they will be implacable in order to hold onto their loot. We gave everything, even what wasn’t ours—the blood of others with our own—for an unknown future. They say that everything has been achieved so that no one will ask them for anything. And for them, everything has been achieved since they have everything. They will be inhuman out of cowardice. [emphasis added]
Particulars change. Nevertheless, history repeats. Over and over again. Always providing glimpses of seemingly improbable futures.
As I reflected on Alexei Navalny’s murder by the Putin regime, as I was pondering my tsonduku (thanks for that bit of concise brilliance, Ilse), Midnight in the Century was practically glowing to attract my attention, almost yelling that it was the right time to read it. Now. How could I resist?
Victor Serge’s dense classic is a somewhat biographical account of trying to survive under Stalin’s vicious, brutal, state-sanctioned totalitarianism. Set when the Russian Revolution was undergoing revolutionary change, after Trotsky’s banishment and the apex of Stalin’s consolidation of power, most remembered for show trials when millions of Soviet citizens were isolated, murdered, and terrified into submission. To fully appreciate and understand the plot—and I plead guilty to taking time to refresh myself with some Russian history I had long forgotten or misremembered—a knowledge of that era more than helpful. Thankfully, this NYRB edition contains a helpful glossary to help the reader along.
This is less a novel and more of five short stories connected by a thread; characters and stories that come together in exile through various deeds, suspicions, and paranoias. One is about an engineer sent on a tour of Europe to inspect electrical systems. He studied electrical grids in London, Paris, Berlin, and finally Warsaw. While touring Paris, his room was meticulously searched by agents of the GPU, the Soviet secret police. They find a treatise written by Trotsky hidden under folded clothing, photograph it, and then painstakingly replace everything to leave no evidence of their inspection. He disposes of it in the toilet on the train from Warsaw back to Russia, only to be arrested to begin his odyssey of exile of repression. His fate was sealed when the evidence of his crime of reading is circulated with administrative efficiency.
…a confidential packet is sent to the GPU Special service…There typists will make several copies: 1st for the central file, 2nd for the political section (suspected Trotskyists), 3rd for the economic section (suspected saboteurs), 4th for the foreign section (suspected spies).
The connecting narrative thread is a conviction that a better world is possible, but hypocrisies of their contemporary world will do all they can to stymy the fulfillment and engagement of their lives, intellects, actions, or thoughts. As they do in ours.
“And thought?” asked Rodian. “Thought?”
“Ah! Right now it’s something of a midnight sun piercing the skull. Glacial. What’s to be done if it’s midnight in the century?”
“Midnight’s where we have to live then,” said Rodian with an odd elation.
In this excerpt, Serge asks nagging questions that lead to unsettling answers. With the murder of Navalny, a war in Ukraine threatening to widen into northern and central Europe, continued genocide in Palestine, impending dictatorship in the United States, tragedy and injustice fueled by unrelenting climate change ignored by policy makers everywhere, and countless other atrocities seemingly in every part of the world, what’s to be done if we might be living in the midnight of this century? Nothing provides hope we’re even aware of it, or even prepared to live in it. Much less, as with the characters in this novel, try to do something about it despite the personal investments they make and the costs they must pay. If we could,
“We would be quite dangerous if we existed in the political sense of the word."
”One corruption in exchange for another, and this infiltrated their blood…”
Kapos were inmates selected to be overseers of other prisoners to maint
”One corruption in exchange for another, and this infiltrated their blood…”
Kapos were inmates selected to be overseers of other prisoners to maintain order in concentration camps. Nobel Prize laureate Imre Kertész questioned if they were “victim[s] or perpetrator[s].” Primo Levi went further. “[N]o one is authorised to judge them, not those who lived through the experience of the Lager and even less those who did not live through it.” Both Kertész and Levi are far too lenient. Their reasoning leads to a conclusion that little difference exists between Kapos and, for example, the post-World War II mythos of “innocent bystanders,” Mitläufer. Their logic comes close to absolving atrocities carried out in the names of nations, movements, or religions. Reckonings, accountings of individual decisions and deeds are necessary. We don't need equivocations, rationalizations, or acquittals. Aleksandar Tišma’s novel Kapo only underscores how mistaken such blanket exonerations are. Kapos were reprehensible people making conscious decisions and among the very worst of innumerable monsters who make the machinery of genocide operate as efficiently as possible.
Lamian (I don’t recall a first name ever being used) was a Kapo who survived Auschwitz. Born in Croatia between the world wars, his Jewish parents convert him Catholicism, hoping to spare him the degradations of living in an anti-Semitic world. Despite their love and concern for him, he becomes a pathetic, psychically selfish, irretrievably damaged man. He is incapable of relating to or empathizing with others, even when they try to show him love and care. Yet he is offended when others do so with him. When his “Jewishness” becomes politically insurmountable, leading him to be rounded up in Zagreb by Croatian fascists to killed to be eliminated, he takes on the identity of a dead Gentile who is also destined for Auschwitz, where he becomes a Kapo, more precisely, “that he must become a Kapo.”
“He no longer belonged to that corrupt race, he belonged only to himself, to his own body, which strove to vent itself, to burst its chains – in order to live."
Living for Kapos means creating chains for others, but they cannot escape becoming entwined themselves. Lamian rationalizes letting children innocently play games when he knows he will soon herd them into gas chambers, collect their bodies, and bring them to the crematoriums. The inevitability of the facts takes over his free will:
“He had hastened to carry out the truth, to carry it out in all its rigor, beating those who didn’t obey immediately. Because he…believed that to ignore the truth did no good, only harm.”
Lamian, like other Kapos, is
“…condemned to death like the rest of that great heap of flesh, but allowed to postpone their death by hastening it for others.”
Lamian’s truths include extracting the gold fillings from the teeth from Auschwitz’s dead. Gold he collects for his Nazi patron, gold he helps his patron escape with as both survive the liberation of Auschwitz. His truths include raping and tormenting a Jewish girl. One who also survives Auschwitz. And decades later, after he has made his way back to Yugoslavia, he resettles in Banja Luka.
“He had chosen that sleepy town among the mountains as a place to wait, peering out, for the hand of revenge sooner or later to clap down on him. Hiding, pulling into himself, fattening his body to alter his appearance, keeping silent so his voice would not be recognized, squinting behind dark glasses.”
And after a life of isolated anonymity, after he qualifies for retirement, he searches for the girl from Auschwitz, now an old woman. He is on a quest to find her. Is it to satisfy himself by tormenting her? Or to satisfy some perverse, sick reunion? Because
“the images trapped in the brain could not be cleaned away…”
He desperately wants to clean them away. Because like an authentic Kapo, he believes himself to be the real victim.
Tišma crafts a story that lingers. Actually, more than that. One that reminds the reader that Kapos have existed throughout history, probably never more so than today. They are our neighbors, coworkers, acquaintances, and friends. And sometimes they are even us....more
I couldn’t help but ponder if this might be the kind of novel P.G. Wodehouse would write if his gift for writing were about the brutal psychology of iI couldn’t help but ponder if this might be the kind of novel P.G. Wodehouse would write if his gift for writing were about the brutal psychology of inherited privilege instead of humor (or, perhaps more appropriately in this case, humour) about it. The setting Molly Keane employed in this novel would find many parallels with his—substituting Ireland for England, but otherwise familiar.
In place of gentle nibbles of comedy, however, there is gnawing frustration and intrigue covered up by good behavior (or behaviour). Instead of camaraderie and joking irony, there is a competition for favor (or favour). In Keane’s case, there is no happy ending, no tying up of loose ends. Her world is threadbare. Both writers, in their own ways, expose the hollowness of families and society. Wodehouse laughs about it continuously. Keane inserts occasional moments of absurdity shrouded in uncomfortable, shallow, often toxic, relationships. Wodehouse I can read for escape and fun over and over again. Keane leaves behind mirrored reflections that inform and disturb. They will likely revisit anytime I think of, or possibly reread, this book again. Therein lies a certain splendor (or splendour)....more
Dead Souls is a reminder of why we have a compulsion to read. A complete joy of a book, a masterpiece, a collection of insights into a bygone culturalDead Souls is a reminder of why we have a compulsion to read. A complete joy of a book, a masterpiece, a collection of insights into a bygone cultural age echoing throughout history into our contemporary world. I cannot adequately express how much I loved every word from beginning to end.
Set in a Russia in an age when landowning aristocrats—ranging from prosperous to inept—were responsible for, or more precisely, owned, serfs, or muzhiks, the plot follows the exploits and experiences of a true scoundrel, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov as he travels around Russia, accompanied by his own two servants. His schemes to hoodwink them into buying their dead serfs, their dead souls, and use the paperwork of ownership to mortgage them someday somewhere, prospers, is almost thwarted by suspicious gossip, and almost comes to fruition before escaping to who knows what.
The novel is unfinished, fragmentary towards the end due to Gogol’s state of mind as he neared death. But what he left behind does not suffer from any omissions. Along the way, Chichikov learns the lesson from one of the landowners he visits that “A comrade or companion will cheat you and be the first to betray you in trouble; but a kopeck will never betray you, whatever trouble you get into. You can do everything and break through everything with a kopeck.”...more
“The heroes cleansed our world of chthonic terrors—earthborn monsters that endangered mankind and threatened to choke the rise of civilizations. So lo
“The heroes cleansed our world of chthonic terrors—earthborn monsters that endangered mankind and threatened to choke the rise of civilizations. So long as dragons, giants, centaurs, and mutant beasts infested the air, earth, and seas, we could never spread out with confidence and transform the wild world into a place of safety for humanity.”
I wanted to like this book. I really did. After all, I very much liked the preceding volume of Stephen Fry’s trilogy of Greek mythology, Mythos. I just couldn’t snuggle up to this one.
Mythos had a certain originality, albeit the kind some purists would find offensive or trite, that seemed to spring, Athena-like, from Fry’s passion. The problem I had with Heroes is that it seemed as though he was filling a contractual obligation. Or trying too hard to find some contemporary swagger for a young audience. An exchange between two characters, one calling the other a “prick.” Or take Acrisius of Argos, for example, whose wife conceived Perseus after Zeus changed shape and literally rained down on her, exclaiming, “If that brat doesn’t stop screaming, I’ll smother him with this cushion.” Or Jason asking, “Where are we sailing to now? You can at least tell me that,” being met by with a response of one who “ummed, ahhed, and tutted.” The Wodehouse-ian attempt at humor just fell flat for me in this context.
For those who didn’t like Mythos, my complaints certainly must sound hollow and hypocritical. “Isn’t that the same thing he did in that volume?”, they might rightfully ask. But to me, it seems like a qualitative difference. As the epigram take from his concluding pages above and the one cited below demonstrate, Fry has a deep understanding of what heroes are and why we have a need to, indeed have compulsions, to try to identify and understand them. In the telling of these tales, however, I feel it fell flat. And it doesn’t motivate me to want to read the final volume of Fry’s trilogy.
“Wicked men who send heroes on their quests always believe that they are sending them to certain death. Wicked men never learn, for wicked men have no interest in myths, legends, and stories. If they had they would learn from them and triumph, so we must be glad of their ignorance and dullness of wits.”
Naziism and fascism live because they intentionally blur distinctions between fact and fiction: treating lies, misconceptions, and distortions as factNaziism and fascism live because they intentionally blur distinctions between fact and fiction: treating lies, misconceptions, and distortions as facts, by mischaracterizing realities and histories as contrived, malleable fictions. In this fictional work, parading as a nonfiction collection of short biographies, Bolaño turns this premise inside out. He creates a collection of fictional biographical sketches put together in the form of reference work that seems all too real. Implied throughout is the reality that Nazis have existed in the Americas, North and South, long after Naziism was defeated in World War II. One can only speculate about what he would have written today had he not died decades before having it become indisputable that Nazis are in ascendance throughout the world, especially in the United States.
Even the thumbnail entries about secondary figures, notes about nonexistent publishing houses, and a bibliography of imaginary works in the concluding pages add to the primary collection of biographies and are just as readable. Some are even deviously humorous, like the short entry about the imaginary Nazi philosopher who “influenced” many writers in South America, Otto Haushofer. He “committed suicide” in Berlin in 1945 “after being raped by three drunk Uzbek soldiers.” Visualizing ironic, painful deaths of Nazis, whether they are real or imagined can be very satisfying....more
This novella is a punch in the gut. It is so raw and visceral that, despite its plot, it rises to become something special. When we read about the hisThis novella is a punch in the gut. It is so raw and visceral that, despite its plot, it rises to become something special. When we read about the histories of wars, about the machinations of the powerful, we too often forget what happens when human beings must do the dirty work of implementing lofty ideas. It is set in World War II. We know nothing about the place or people we will encounter in this short journey. But what happens on the ground, what happens to the individuals who survive and fight on, that's a story that's hard to tell.
I couldn't help but think of the atrocities we read about every day now in Ukraine. Hermans describes the random executions, rapes, and humiliations people who are in the middle of war endure. He doesn't explain why. Who could? But he shows us an episode of "how." It is one we would all do well to read, especially leaders who make decisions about war in sanitized rooms with maps and board games....more
“It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros, or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks
“It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros, or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying. To me at least…”
If Stephen Fry’s intention for this witty, relaxed interpretation of Greek mythology was “doing [his] bit to keep them alive”, then I’d have to say he was quite successful. However, this is not a book for everyone. Some just want to be reminded of their youthful dalliances with mythology, but not as an academic, and enjoy learning how mythology has affected language and explained the sources of names in nature as well as bits of geography. That, plus a bit of entertainment is pretty much what drew me to this volume. Being a fan of some of the programs with Stephen Fry like A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster (still the best Jeeves on film), and Blackadder. But this is more like the Stephen Fry who hosts the British chat show QI. For fans of that program and others who generally know what to expect, Fry’s voice can be heard in every sentence. So I enjoyed it. But I can get why some might not. And so does Fry. (If you find the various quotations in the "Reading Progress" section below and like the humor and irreverence, you might well like this book.)
“To retell Greek mythological stories is to tread in the footsteps of giants”, Fry acknowledges, and for those who revere those retellings, this book might not be their thing. I’ve casually looked into Greek mythology books over the past decade, usually when in a bookstore somewhere. But I’m not really looking for poetic prose like the recent critically acclaimed editions of The Odyssey and The Iliad, hundreds of pages of translated poetry. It’s just not my thing. But for traditionalists, retellings using modern colloquialisms, references to current cultural events, and humorous analogies might be a bit much. Indeed, I could see how one reading this book in two hundred years will find as many references and inferences that say as much about our contemporary humor and references than they do about mythological antiquity.
When I devoured Greek mythology as a third and fourth grader, the sexual license that seemingly occurs in every story went right over my head. Or perhaps I read sanitized versions. It is not hard to understand why sexism has been rampant in human history after reading a few of these.
But ultimately mythology is about man and religion, or as Fry sums it up, “At some point myth becomes cult becomes religion.” Like all religious texts, these myths explain the world and our place in it. What is wonderful about this Greek (and Roman) religion is its bottom-up nature. While the gods impose from above, it is really humans that confound them. Today, I would guess, most organized religions surely would confound their gods, or at least how they interpret them. I like how constant human fallibility and foibles impact the Greek gods. It makes them more relatable than the one Moses encountered. Take, for example, Hephaestus (the Roman Vulcan), arguably the most amiable and admirable of the gods. “Any god of blacksmiths that the collective culture imagined, therefore, would be likely to reflect the human archetype they already know. Gods of this kind are created in man’s image, not the other way around.” That’s what makes mythology fun....more
Upon finishing this incredibly subtle, moving novel, I thought about how someone in American media marketing would make the premise so very different.Upon finishing this incredibly subtle, moving novel, I thought about how someone in American media marketing would make the premise so very different. A young woman, who knew she had been given up to a loving couple in infancy, learns that she has a twin sister. The American version of this script is fairly predictable: unresolved tensions that explode in violence, retribution, and a constant search for motives. As an American might say, “this ain’t that.”
In Kawabata’s telling, the story is more about roles and customs that once endured in Japanese society. The childless couple that unquestionably assumes their duties to care for an abandoned child still feels guilt that they somehow “stole” it. Their daughter’s love for them does not wane or wobble as she learns about her own fate. Because fate is something one accepts, one makes the best of it, and actually learns to make it an enjoyable part of their lives. At least that seems to be the implication.
Reading this is more of a mesmerizing experience where what initially seems obvious is anything but. The relationship between the newly found sisters offers new possibilities, but not outside of the other duties that already exist in their lives. While there is beauty and fulfillment in just experiencing nature in its very many guises, it comes within expectations and boundaries. If you’re a lover of films and, in particular, Japanese films, then think of this as more of an Ozu movie. The slightest movements or phrases often have great impact. I’m not sure if the ending was happy or not. I just know that a sense of fate, duty, and obligation will be on side that prevails, but it seems there will be an ever-present melancholy accompanying this responsibility which is readily accepted. And considering these days, this ain't such a bad thing....more
William Burroughs’s friend, the artist Brion Gysin, introduced him to a surrealist technique of writing known as the cut up method, in which printed wWilliam Burroughs’s friend, the artist Brion Gysin, introduced him to a surrealist technique of writing known as the cut up method, in which printed works from various sources are literally cut up and randomly rearranged. Gysin used it in a work and noticed some of the final products were “emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose.” Writing in the early 60s, Burroughs observed, “the cut up method brings to writers the collage which has been used by painters.” It was a method “for everyone,” one “anybody can make,” one that Burroughs most famously employed in writing Naked Lunch.
In Doppelgänger, Croatian writer Daša Drndić employs a modified cut up technique for large parts of the novel, taking her own work and, rather than moving words randomly, took sections and paragraphs to rearrange the story, separating them by dotted lines with a centered scissors symbol. When the first appear, they are confusing. Imagine taking parts of a narrative and randomly cutting it up and then reordering them, how that could lose one’s orientation. One extended passage near the end (view spoiler)[, in which we experience the protagonist’s descending deterioration into madness, (hide spoiler)] acts as the glue bringing a confirming order to the plot.
Drndić’s writing—at least what I have read—has consistent themes about memory; how it is hidden or forgotten, and how it creates whatever views of history we have about injustice, culture, and totalitarian societies. This time the story begins with an encounter of an elderly couple who meet at the turn of the 21st century before the modified cut up story of a former Yugoslavian spy and his family takes unexpected turns. The connection to the couple turns out to be both minor, and for the protagonist, revealing, although he is not aware of it. It is also a story about the tenuous connections of family bonds and relationships, one that will either linger with or frustrate the reader. With me it lingers, it connects. Drndić also uses her plots to teach about historical events and people, inserting her questions, observations, and views about them. This is endearing and motivates me to want to read more of her works, but I could understand how some readers might be put off.
Should this cryptic “review” intrigue, her writing might also do so as well. But if it sounds too pedantic and arcane, I doubt it would....more
Trieste is neither fiction nor nonfiction, bridging both into a unique narrative. Profoundly so. Daša Drndić meanders purposefully to uncover and recaTrieste is neither fiction nor nonfiction, bridging both into a unique narrative. Profoundly so. Daša Drndić meanders purposefully to uncover and recall historical anecdotes that simultaneously avoid and burden memory with uncomfortable facts. Her gifts as a scholar, observer and writer brings those memories back to become unavoidable and eternal. She creates a historical gravity, grounding the reader in reality, not a convenient amnesia or self-serving mythology.
After reading Drndić’s Belladonna I was literally left speechless, unable to comment on a book I felt was written just for me. It seemed to grasp into my psyche and address virtually all the questions about truth, existence, and hypocrisy that have seeming haunted me my entire life. I knew I would have to read it again to begin to try to understand both the meaning of the book and my response to it. But before doing so, near the beginning of the Belladonna, the protagonist meets one of the main characters of Trieste. Their encounter is not central to the plot, more of a fleeting reference. But I sensed that lingering itch of knowing why Drndić included it needed to be addressed before I could move on. And then I was gutted by Trieste.
More than any topic, theme, or character, Trieste is a novel about how easily memory is lost, distorted, and forgotten—intentionally calculated or not; of how difficult it is to recognize, accept and retain. The memories here are mostly those of Croatia’s bond to Naziism before, during, and after World War II, with some side journeys to Germany, Italy, Austria, and Switzerland. The memories she recalls create and ask more questions than provide answers. They burrow into the very nature of truth itself. How can or do we face it? Assess it? Live with it? Is it enlightening or a burden? Crippling or liberating? Or can it be both and neither? Or does memory cloud and distort how we wish the world were, as we think it should be.
Haya Tedeschi, a grandchild of a veteran of long forgotten part of World War I—seemingly everyone identifies it with the Western Front. Who remembers the battles and tragedies along the Italian/Slovenian/Croatian theaters? And what about those who are caught in the middle of war? Haya observes, “There are civilians in war. They do not fight. Civilians live. Civilians do their best to go on as if nothing were happening. As if life were beautiful. As if they were children.” She is born in Gorizia, bordering Slovenia and Italy, a city between two worlds. Her father is Jewish, which becomes more of an issue when she goes to Italy. Her shared national identities become allied—actually, more than allied—with Nazi Germany. “She has always been somehow weightless, free of the heavy burdens of mother tongues, national histories, native soils, homelands, fatherlands, myths, that many of the people around her tote on their backs like a sack of heavy stones.” She studies mathematics, but that too, she learns, is not an apolitical subject in a fascist world. The burdens the Tedeschis carry leaving Gorizia for a roundabout journey that takes them to Albania, Naples, and Trieste where Haya, a Jew, has an illicit affair with a German SS soldier, which produces a child.
She unknowingly becomes a passive Jewish fascist, surviving as various political, military, and Catholic Croatians embrace Nazi ideals and behavior more eagerly than many of their German counterparts. Haya eventually becomes victimized herself when her son is first rejected by his biological father and then stolen, with a priest’s complicity. He lives for decades in ignorance of his origins and later with the uncertainty of what happened to him. Though the relationship and the child were not visibly products of the “messianic mission” of official SS policy, he collateral damage of the Lebensborn program, with the intent of creating a new generation of Nazis. The program is part of the Nazi perversion in which “[t]he cunt makes a difference, the cock defines the difference. Castration, sterilization, controlled procreation, fornication and prostitution are the most powerful weapons of the Reich, the greatest obsession of the Reich, and furthermore, of the Church.” Drndić fills this tale with historical anecdotes, the names of victims otherwise forgotten, and an unflinching devotion to truth. It is, quite simply, must reading for any student of fascism, the Third Reich, and the complicit nations, organizations, individuals, and religions that helped make its most heinous crimes against humanity a reality. And perhaps more so for anyone who wants to understand where the rapid ascendance of fascism today in every part of the globe will likely lead.
[The original title of the book is Sonnenschein, the German word for sunshine. In American English, “sunshine laws” are those intended to “shine a light” on some issue. This, it seems to me, is the only appropriate title for the book. Trieste is not the main setting of this book and it puzzles me why the translators would choose it.]...more
To be honest, and to my great shame, I was unaware of Muriel Spark until I read some reviews of her works by GR friends. I’ve been meaning for years tTo be honest, and to my great shame, I was unaware of Muriel Spark until I read some reviews of her works by GR friends. I’ve been meaning for years to pick one up, and a poorly planned reading schedule for a business trip and a gem of a bookstore find in Austin, TX (be sure to visit Malvern Books if you are ever in the area), this novel yelled out at me as I perused the shelves.
This is a wonderful little book, a kind of mystery story for people who don’t read mystery stories. More than the plot, the simplicity of the writing really takes center stage. And the plot revolves around a subject matter rarely treated with such bluntness, aging. The characters are invariably old with most in a home for the aging. A mysterious phone call warning an old woman that she will die soon sets off a Coen brothers-like plot that has little intention but a lot of wonderful side stories along the way that come to an untidy resolution. Perhaps my own aging process had something to do with my enjoyment of this short book....more
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