Click here to read my short Guardian review of Christine Schutt’s collection of Stories Pure Hollywood, which is part of the Year of Publishing Women initiative by & Other Stories.
Natalia Ginzburg: The Little Virtues
Click here to read my little review in The Guardian of The Little Virtues, Natalia Ginzburg’s collection of essays which has just been reissued by Daunt Books.
Yuko Tsushima: Territory of Light
Click here to read my review in the Irish Times of Yuko Tsushima’s novel Territory of Light, translated by Geraldine Harcourt and published by Penguin Classics.
Mercè Rodoreda: Death in Spring
Now here is a book cover to arrest the browser’s fickle gaze, with an elegant and beautiful balance of text, image and abstract colour. And it’s not a one-off, but part of a series design – Penguin European Writers – with titles by Cesare Pavese and Violette Leduc coming later this year. For the paper-fetishists among us, it’s a fine book-handling experience too, with flapped covers, slim format and printed on untreated card. And – I almost forgot – it’s one of the strangest and best books I’ve read this year.
If I had to sum up Death in Spring (1986; tr. 2009 by Martha Tennent) with one line from the book, it would be the sentence that opens a chapter midway through: “When they pulled the boy from the river, he was dead; they returned him to the river.” This is a book full of reverses, balances and contradictions, that is entirely unexpected and repeatedly surprising. It tells of man against nature, where nature always wins because man is an interloper, a corrupted part of nature. The first page has the narrator, an unnamed fourteen-year-old boy, bathing in a river, and immediately the language pinpoints where the power lies. “…the mass of water descending from the mountains … All the waters joined together in the delirium of joining and flowed endlessly…” If the river doesn’t kill, it can leave a man with his face “ripped away when the desperate water hurled him against the rocks that supported the village.” And it’s not just the water: when young men try to collect powder to make paint for the village houses, the wind blows, “telling us that ours was a senseless job, something that was better left undone.” Even plants are in on it: “the strong wisteria vines, the wisteria that over the years upwrenched houses.”
We don’t know where the book is set, and although Rodoreda was Catalan, the setting has a more far-flung feel to it. Indeed, this is not a novel of the world we know at all, as we learn a few chapters in when the narrator’s father opens up a tree by carving a cross into it, then closes himself into the tree to die (though his death has a further stage to go, more grotesque still). It is fully loaded with sensory detail and often has the feel, cruelty and horror of a good fairy tale. “The village was born from the earth’s terrible unrest.” Bees, plants and worms are all malevolent, though they can suffer too in ironic flourishes: “In the fountain little worms curled and uncurled, rapidly. If they entered a person’s body, they burrowed through bones, veins and skin in order to escape. As soon as they broke the surface, they died, because they could not live without water.”
Death in Spring is not – it may go without saying at this stage – a book with a straightforward plot. There are recurring characters – the narrator’s stepmother, a blacksmith and his child, a prisoner, a village elder known as Senyor – and episodes of vivid action, but it is episodic and the book’s effect is not of a line following a path, but of a mood cloud. Colm Tóibín in his introduction does not attempt to explain the book in a traditional sense, and one Amazon reviewer notes that the happy reader must “curb any tendency to gain dominion over the narrative.” That is one way of putting it. In a sense the book doesn’t even have a beginning or ending, as the clear implication is that the narrator will end up as his father did, and that the cycle of life and death with continue. “Things don’t die. They continue. They pass from one to another.” Speaking out against the propagation of life late in the book is Senyor, in an extraordinary monologue:
That’s what kept me alive, never stopping, never stopping, one woman after another, always preferring the other one. I didn’t know then what was inside a man, and when I discovered, I wanted to die. […] Spring is sad, in spring all the world is ill, plants and flowers are the earth’s plague, rotten. The earth would be calmer if it were green-less, without this fury, this blind will that consumes everything but craves more, the affliction of the green, so much greenness and poisonous colour.
It is a book full of anger, horror and disgust but also of beauty in the vivid language and imaginative energy that explodes on every page. It is a bold choice to open the Penguin European Writers series and entirely unlike the nostalgic tale of love in sunny piazzas suggested by the cover image. It was published three years after Rodoreda’s death but in no sense does Death in Spring read like scraps from the writer’s drawer. It is clearly a fully realised work of art, an expression of vision, and entirely sui generis. It is, as the narrator describes a mountain spring, “something alive that I couldn’t understand”, and which is impossible to forget.
Penguin Modern
Three years ago, Penguin hit paydirt with its Little Black Classics range: short, pocket-sized slices of work from the authors in its Classics imprint, at 80p a pop, to celebrate 80 years of Penguin Books. It wasn’t a new idea: they did it before in 1995 (with the Penguin 60s, with both contemporary and classic authors), in 2005 (with the Pocket Penguin 70s – no, not those Pocket Penguins – containing old and new writing by Penguin authors) and in 2011, to celebrate 60 years of Penguin Modern Classics (with the Mini Modern Classics). And here is another set, 50 slim selections from the Modern Classics range, branded laconically as Penguin Modern.
It seems that Penguin has learned from the sales for Little Black Classics (more than two million in the first year) to put the books at an irresistible price point. The Mini Modern Classics were overpriced at £3 each: these are a pound. As with the previous sets, the list is well-curated in that almost every volume contains self-contained work: one or two stories or essays, typically. To me that matters because I can hold in my hand a slim volume and say “this is Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’!” and because there’s something dingy and disrespectful about abridging longer pieces to fit this length (they’re all around 64 pages). That’s why I had no interest in last year’s Vintage Minis, which got it horribly wrong by mostly being samplers of larger books (Heller’s masterpiece Something Happened reduced to 100 pages!), except when they got it horribly wronger by using complete texts but renaming them (so Huxley’s The Doors of Perception became Psychedelics, and Styron’s Darkness Visible became Depression).
So what’s the purpose of the new Penguin Modern list? Well, it ties in with the new eau-de-nil look for Penguin Modern Classics (readers of an age with me will remember this as the signature colour for Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics in the 1990s, the list from which I first read the likes of Fitzgerald, Greene, Woolf and Waugh). If there’s an anniversary to mark this time around, I’m unaware of it. But the press for the series says it’s about capturing the “pioneering spirit” of Penguin Modern Classics. Certainly if you compare this list to the 2011 Mini Modern Classics, it’s less mainstream – and even those authors whose names are more familiar than your own toothbrush are at the radical end of the literary establishment (Borges, Kafka, Beckett). The sources are a little more diverse too: last time we had 11 women out of 50, this time it’s 17; then there were 3 books by non-white authors, now there are 7; and the number of books in translation has risen from 11 to 19.
The other purpose, for the reader, is to try authors you might otherwise not have wanted to shell out a tenner on, or would never have had the stamina to tackle at full length. The latter is certainly my experience: like the much-missed KevinfromCanada, I prefer to read books, not parts of books, so whereas I’ve had Sontag’s Against Interpretation on my shelves for years, awaiting retirement or empty nest syndrome or some other factor that will give me the time and intellectual room to tackle it, I can read ‘Notes on “Camp”‘ in this new series in one gulp. For me, some of the titles here were a chance to revisit authors I’d read in my youth but never since, so I was reminded how playful and approachable Borges’s stories are, even through their intellectual rigour: the outward simplicity of ‘The Book of Sand’ and its “monstrous” infinite volume, or the spy story structure of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ and its exploration of time and futures: “The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.”
For some of the familiar authors here, the material is ‘new’; for example I was pleased that James Baldwin’s Dark Days contains three short, late essays not available in the current Penguin collections, Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name. Baldwin is always good value, and his writing often has the cadences of oratory, a consequence of his time as a child preacher, with all the repetition that that entails:
Not one of us – black or white – knows how to walk when we get here. Not one of us knows how to open a window, unlock a door. Not one of us can master a staircase. We are absolutely ignorant of the almost certain results of falling out of a five-storey window. Not one of us comes here knowing enough not to play with fire. Nor can one of us drive a tank, fly a jet, hurl a bomb, or plant a tree.
We must be taught all that. We have to learn all that. The irreducible price of learning is realising that you do not know. One may go further and point out – as any scientist, or artist, will tell you – that the more you learn, the less you know; but that means you have begun to accept, and are even able to rejoice in, the relentless conundrum of your life.
In these essays it’s easy to see Baldwin’s influence on Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose We Were Eight Years in Power was one of the best books I read last year. Here’s Baldwin in the final essay, ‘The White Man’s Guilt’:
I have known many black men and women and black boys and girls who really believed it was better to be white than black, whose lives were ruined or ended by this belief; and I, myself, carried the seeds of this destruction within me for a long time.
What about the authors I didn’t already know? I liked Yuko Tsushima’s stories in Of Dogs and Walls (the title story taking its inspiration from Marcel Aymé’s The Man Who Walked Through Walls). Both are hybrid pieces, which start in one way – gentle, familial, pastoral even – and become much sharper and tougher. Tsushima is one of the writers here who isn’t actually in Penguin Modern Classics yet: her novel Territory of Light is published in English for the first time in April, and this is the first translation of these stories too. Something to look forward to.
Also new to Penguin is prolific Nigerian Igbo writer Cyprian Ekwensi. “Five decades or more of writing have brought me world fame but not fortune,” he said in 1999. “If I were an American living in America or Europe, I would be floating in a foam bath in my own private yacht off the coast of Florida.” Penguin will reissue his most popular novel Jagua Nana later this year, and his contribution to this series is a standalone story first published in 1966. ‘Glittering City’ shows us the life and times – and women – of Fussy Joe, a musician and chancer in Lagos, a “bed-bug of a man” according to one of those women, who “didn’t seem to have one serious thought in his life,” and whose “interest in any girl became more intense if he knew that she was engaged to a good friend of his.” Of course such luck cannot last long. Even when the ending turns sober, though, Ekwensi’s telling never loses its liveliness, and that lack of fortune he bemoaned seems truly unjust.
One of the most interesting of the titles I read is Wendell Berry’s Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer, which starts with the very short title piece from Harper’s Magazine where the farmer and prolific novelist, ecological essayist and poet explains why he doesn’t want a word processor. Not having a computer in 1987 was a less notable stance than it is now, and the piece would hardly be worth mentioning if it wasn’t for the way Berry gets his dander up in response to readers’ letters to Harper’s after the piece appeared. Most of the readers are good-humoured in their letters, whereas Berry’s response is frankly, as Marge Gunderson would put it, snippy. Even worse, the other essay here, ‘Feminism, the Body and the Machine’, from two years later, begins: “Some time ago, Harper’s reprinted a short essay of mine in which I gave some of my reasons for refusing to buy a computer…”
Oh Wendell! Let it go! But he’s back, with more points to make after stewing on it for a couple of years. In fact this piece is much more interesting and wider-ranging than the first, though sets standards for others no less unrealistic (“I do not believe that ’employment outside the home’ is as valuable or important or satisfying as employment at home, for either men or women”, which is easy for you to say if you’ve got your own farmland and a hotline to Harper’s). He does admit that “one cannot construct an adequate public defence of a private life” and, as the essay moves from thought to thought, his anti-consumerist rhetoric and warnings about technology “replac[ing] ourselves” sound more timely now than ever. He acknowledges that even he cannot live as he recommends, and when he writes “I still fly on aeroplanes” despite them being “inconvenient, uncomfortable, undependable, ugly, stinky and scary,” it’s hard not to wonder if, writing a year after even Margaret Thatcher was warning of the perils of climate change, he isn’t overlooking a more obvious problem with air travel. He does write very engagingly, however, and I was driven to find an interview with Berry from 2012, where – for what this is worth in a writer – he comes across as much more human than he does here, and with greater understanding of how his lifestyle won’t work for most (“Don’t do it”). Oh, and these days “I do have a bit of commerce with a computer that belongs to a friend of mine, who does a lot of my typing for me.”
Similarly uncompromising is Audre Lorde, who has a handful of short pieces, mostly originating as lectures, collected in The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. (All are taken from Silver Press’s recent publication Your Silence Will Not Protect You, ahead of the Penguin reissue of her ‘biomythography’ Zami later this year.) Lorde, who described herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” makes it clear from the start that she is speaking to us from outside the establishment, with her self-definition of poetry as
the revelation of distillation of experience, not the sterile word-play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean – in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
As a white father myself, I’d say sterility is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s no more fruitful to attack – who did she mean? – Eliot, say, than it is to denigrate the poetry of Rupi Kaur to those who love it. But she packs a punch on the value of poetry, however you define it. “Poetry is the way we give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” Or, later: “Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible or frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems.” Elsewhere, in the title essay, she is an early proponent of intersectionality. “It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.” She ends with Simone de Beauvoir: “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.”
This Penguin Modern series overall gives Penguin an opportunity to recast the character of its Modern Classics range. It’s a list which has traditionally been dominated by early-20C English language writers – the Woolfs and Fitzgeralds, Greenes and Waughs I mentioned earlier – and even now, when you search the list by ‘Relevance’ on Penguin’s website, top hits are the likes of George Orwell, James Joyce and Kingsley Amis. But in recent years it has expanded into more crime, more SF and more diverse voices, which has worked only because the quality of the writing has always been paramount. (And then there’s John Christopher.) These 50 mini-books strongly foreground the newer stuff, with only a few traditional Modern Classics authors: Steinbeck, Nabokov, Bellow … and Orwell.
A word about the cover designs for this series. The typeface is Avant Garde, named after the New York magazine for which it was created, and it comes with numerous bespoke and playful ligatures to join certain letter combinations, which the Penguin design team has made full use of – adding, I suppose, to the air of radicalism the series seeks to project. When I first saw these designs in the Penguin catalogue last year, I hated them. Now I love them. And that is why I will never be a designer.
Zadie Smith: Feel Free
Click on the link below to read my review in the Irish Times of Zadie Smith’s second collection of essays, Feel Free. My review was edited for length, so I’ve included the original opening paragraph below:
A few years ago, Zadie Smith reviewed a collection of Geoff Dyer’s essays for Harper’s magazine, and praised his “tone. Its simplicity, its classlessness, its accessibility and yet its erudition – the combination is a trick few British writers ever pull off.” Whether Smith was hoping that one day someone would say the same of her, who knows – but here it is. These are exactly the qualities that make her second collection of essays, Feel Free, so valuable. She even, like Dyer, manages to make travel writing not boring.
Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Here is a book whose fearsome reputation precedes it – or should I say (spoiler alert) exceeds it? Berlin Alexanderplatz is a monument of modern German literature and, more prominently to me, a byword for fat unreadability. It’s not clear whether this is because of intrinsic qualities in the book itself, or the widely disliked first English translation by Eugene Jolas. The book is a running joke in Ned Beauman’s novel The Teleportation Accident, where the ‘hero’ Egon Loeser has been trying to read it for 30 years:
About a year earlier, he had taken a slow train to Cologne to visit his great aunt, and on the journey he had deliberately brought nothing to read but Berlin Alexanderplatz, on the basis that after six hours either he would have finished the book or the book would have finished him. He lasted one stop before turning to the other man in the carriage and saying, ‘I will give you fifty-seven marks, which is everything I have in my wallet, for that novel you’re reading.’
‘Don’t you care what it is?’
‘Is it by any chance Berlin Alexanderplatz?’ said Loeser.
‘No.’
‘Then I don’t care what it is.’
Six hours was an optimistic estimate by Loeser – it took me over a week to complete it – but otherwise he was unnecessarily gloomy. In this new translation by Michael Hofmann, Berlin Alexanderplatz is not at all difficult and rarely daunting, except in its length.
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) was originally subtitled The Story of Franz Biberkopf, at the insistence of Döblin’s publisher Samuel Fischer, for whom (writes Hofmann in an excellent afterword) “‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ was the name of a railway stop, not the title of a book.” The subtitle is dropped in this new edition, but if another were to be added, I suggest The City. Just as Melville called his most famous novel Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, because it sought to reduce the entire concept of the whale to writing (though ‘reduce’ is probably not the word), so Döblin does the same not just for Berlin, but the modern city in general. Berlin Alexanderplatz is Europe’s Moby-Dick, a work of unified force whose story is intercut with advertising slogans, court reports, and all manner of found materials whose inclusion has the intended effect: it makes for a book as busy as the city.
The story of Franz Biberkopf (‘beaverhead’) is simple enough. At the start of the book, it’s the beginning of 1928 and Franz has just been released from prison, and immediately we see Döblin’s casual, reflexive style: “The awful moment was at hand (awful, why so awful, Franz?), his four years were up.” It’s awful because freedom is its own punishment, away from the routine and certainties of prison: now, terrifyingly, Franz is once again responsible for his own fate. He does try to go straight, initially through working in trade, selling laces door to door but with ambitions for more (“why not be the man to introduce garden statuary into small towns?”), but we are high in the Weimar republic, and the economic outlook is not favourable (“one and a half million unemployed, up by 226,000 in a fortnight”). It’s inevitable, then, that Franz finds himself falling in with a gang of crooks (“do I run, do I not run, what do I do”), whose company defines him for the rest of the book, through a car accident with dramatic consequences, to his involvement with a string of women – Lena, Eva, Cilly, Sonia (or is it Mitzi?) – none of whom he treats well, to say the least. But here he has – literally – form, as his prison sentence in the first place was for the manslaughter of his girlfriend Ida, to whose killing we get a flashback, in a depersonalising style that George Saunders might have been inspired by:
It only remains to list the further consequences of the process thus initiated: loss of verticality on the part of Ida, reversion to the horizontal, in the form of colossal impact, at the same time as breathing difficulties, intense pain, shock and psychological loss of balance.
Not that anyone else gets off lightly either. Part of the aim of Berlin Alexanderplatz seems to be to show how a great city can be terrible for so many of the people who live in it. To illustrate this, Döblin’s focus, apart from an ironic expression of concern for the impact that inflation is having on the middle classes, is on the down-at-heel and the down-and-out, the occupants of seedy bars and apartment blocks. The story at times threads through the floors of a building, passes from one consciousness to another, reading correspondence, eavesdropping in a pile-up of chaotic set pieces.
Yes, all human life is here, and not just human, as the glamourless locations include the local slaughterhouse (“courts of justice for the beasts”), which is portrayed in a loving four-page description. If Döblin gives the animals here as much attention as he does his humans elsewhere, it’s only to emphasise that the mass of the people in this economically stratified, still war-wrecked country are no better off than the “dear piggies” on their way to market. The ironic and amused tone Döblin adopts here (“We have come to the end of physiology and theology, this is where physics begins”) is common throughout the book, as he peeks out from behind the curtain – look! I am writing a novel! – and this is never better expressed than in the sub-chapter headings:
Markets opening directionless, gradually drifting lower, Hamburg out of bed the wrong side, London continuing weak
Victory all along the line! Franz Biberkopf buys a veal escalope
Keep your eyes on Karl the plumber: something’s going on with him
Reinhold’s Black Wednesday – but this section can be skipped
All in all, Hofmann’s casual style suits the looseness of the narrative (“the book contains a great deal that is simply there for its own sake” he writes in the afterword) pretty well. One of the difficulties for the translator of Berlin Alexanderplatz is the supposedly untranslatable idiomatic language of working-class Berlin, for which Hofmann says he has chosen what fellow German translator Anthea Bell calls “the regional unspecific,” though to me it seemed more directed than that, usually toward British speech (bunch a flars, nothink, facking, even leave it aht), though I suppose if you’re going to settle on a vernacular rendering, European English makes more sense than American. (In the second English translation, by Anne Thompson, northern English dialect was used.)
Berlin Alexanderplatz was a bestseller in its time, so much so that Döblin regretted the shadow it cast over his other work, but for years has been only patchily available in English. This Penguin Classics edition (the same translation is being released in the US by NYRB Classics) is part of a new look reserved for, I think, first publications and significant new translations, presumably to be followed in due course with a standard black Classics or Modern Classics paperback. The covers are colour-coded to indicate the original language, as with the Pocket Penguins series (olive here for German). The rough card covers and spartan design seem to communicate seriousness and significance, like a brown road sign that directs drivers to a destination that’s good for you. That gives it more the daunting quality of black Penguin Classics than the approachable coolness (to me, anyway) of Penguin Modern Classics. Probably either look would be suitable, for a book that is at heart both seriously significant and a great deal of fun.
