Volver la vista atras- Retrospective by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated by Anne Mclean.

This most recent novel by Juan Gabriel Vasquez focuses on the life of Colombian film director Sergio Cabrera. The frame story is Sergio’s trip to Barcelona, where a retrospective festival of his films is taking place. Just before the festival starts, Sergio gets the news that his father, Fausto, has died. Fausto’s death prompts much reflection on his upbringing, and the bulk of the novel takes us back to his extraordinary youth in Mao’s China and in the EPL guerrilla movement in Colombia. We know this is a writer deeply concerned with the history of Colombia, and the account of life in the guerrilla movement is absolutely compelling, but I was also struck by the theme of fathers and sons here, a theme we’ve met in his previous novel, The Informers. Not only do we see the relationship between Sergio and his father Fausto, but also Sergio’s relationship with his own teenage son, Raúl, who accompanies him to the film festival.

The personal retrospective starts with Fausto. His Spanish Republican family is forced into exile at the end of the Civil War and, after living  a while in The Dominican Republic and Venezuela, ends up in Colombia. He becomes an actor, working first on radio, and then television, always maintaining his left wing sympathies through the violence and bloodshed of the late 40s. His politics make life increasingly untenable under the dictatorship of Pinilla, especially with McCarthyism, the Korean war, and the Cuban revolution making Communism seem the biggest threat ever, and Fausto takes up the offer to move his family to Peking for a job teaching Spanish.

Now, up to this point I found the novel a little pedestrian. There was a bit too much straining to fit the Cabrera family’s experiences to seminal historical events to my taste, and I just wasn’t emotionally engaged. This changed completely the moment the family embark on their extraordinary plane journey to Peking in 1968, involving three days confined to a hotel room in Moscow, and stopovers in Omsk and Irkutsk due to technical faults, where they sleep in a freezing shed. Once in Peking, the family are housed in the Hotel de la Amistad, a luxury hotel where foreign workers are accommodated with their families. With its Olympic swimming pool, restaurants and boutiques it represents a sort of parallel universe to the miserable material conditions endured by the Chinese people outside. While Fausto and his wife Luz teach Spanish in the Peking Languages Institute, Sergio and his sister Marianella attend regular school outside the hotel with other Chinese students. From the age of 15, this involves military training for Sergio, including the use of firearms, a bayonet and target practice.

While in Peking, Fausto and Luz hone their Maoist revolutionary credentials. They decide to return to Colombia to take part in the armed struggle there, somewhat alarmingly leaving Sergio and Marianella, aged 16 and 14, behind in Peking. Alarmingly, because this is the eve of the Cultural Revolution, a movement led by school students to propagate the words of Chairman Mao, involving public haranguing and humiliation of authority figures seen as in any way undermining his ideas. There’s a distressing scene where the art and design teacher at Sergio’s school is first criticised, then physically assaulted by his students for saying that the design of an American plane is superior to that of the Soviet plane. School students become members of the Red Guard and sack museums, temples and libraries, seeking to destroy any cultural objects associated with pre-revolutionary values. The schools close down, Sergio and Marianella spend weeks at home, before going off to work in the fields and factories. When Sergio himself becomes a Red Guard, his experience is contrasted with that of a quite different set of teenagers—the children of the diplomatic corps, protected from external political upheavals as they’re whisked from swimming pool to a showing of A Hard Day’s Night, whatever that’s about—Sergio has never heard of The Beatles or their music.

Eventually, Sergio and Marianella are summoned back to Colombia, to Medellín, where Fausto and Luz are both working for the Maoist revolutionary movement, while Fausto is also putting on political theatre. There are tensions between Sergio and his father, who’s quick to criticise his son, and it’s only a matter of time before the two youngsters get The Call.  My heart sank when they’re asked to turn up at the bus stop with a pair of those ominous rubber boots. From my reading of other fiction from Colombia ( The Lucky Ones by Julianne Pachico, This Wound full of Fish by Lorena Salazar Masso), this can only mean one thing: they’re going to join the guerrillas.

There follows a fascinating, if often harrowing, account of their years with the EPL, the Popular Liberation Army, in the deepest and most remote rural areas in the country. They endure considerable physical hardship, walking for days on end in sweltering temperatures with little to eat. What they do eat is what they can hunt—including otters and tapirs—and beg from the poor rural communities they’re working with. Insect bites are a constant problem as well as the threat of serious illnesses such as paludism, and combat injuries, which they’ve barely got the wherewithal to treat. There’s a dreadful emotional toll for Sergio and Marianella too. They’re despised and bullied by their leader Fernando for their educated, bourgeois backgrounds and Marianella is sexually harassed by him, as a result of which she runs away, though we learn that leaving the guerrillas is not so easy, but rather a lifetime’s work.

Some of the best writing is in this long and detailed section. We have fabulous descriptions of the lush and impenetrable jungle, a lucid narrative of the movements and activities of the guerrillas on the ground, but also a moving and intimate account of Sergio’s inner feelings. He has with him the twelve pages of instructions his father gave him before leaving China, his orders on how to behave as a good revolutionary. He consults this regularly, feels constantly guilty that he’s not living up to these high standards, even more so when, as time goes on, he starts wishing he wasn’t there at all.

It’s a relief at times that the intense sections set in China and the jungle are interleaved by occasional passages back in Barcelona at the film festival. We see Sergio mulling over more recent events in his life, his memories triggered by the films, recollecting the places they were first shown, for example the showing of Todos se van in Havana in 2014 when the Colombian Peace Accords were being negotiated and he realises some former guerrillas are in the audience. Then there’s the memories of Bogotá in autumn 2016, when he’s aware of the reservations ordinary Colombians have about the Peace Accords, influenced by the church, by Facebook and Twitter, even then. And these memories mixed with time out spent with his son Raúl, visiting Barcelona book stores and La Sagrada Familia together, talking to him, and eventually showing him family photographs too.

You see, as Sergio tells us, the family never really talked to each other much once they returned from China: they were each busy with their own activities. So it’s as if he’s trying to do something different now with his own son. And though he insists to Raúl that he loved Fausto, who taught him so much about acting, I can’t help feeling it’s significant that neither he nor Marianella go to Fausto’s funeral. There was that thought that would come to Sergio at night in the jungle, and for years after: at what point do parents decide their children would be better off brought up by the revolutionaries than at home with them? So for me, as much as the novel deals with a broad sweep of history—revolutionary movements in China and Colombia—it also digs deep into the personal. It’s a very personal reckoning between Sergio and his father, a reckoning for that abandonment.

Not A River by Selva Almada translated by Annie McDermott

Not A River, shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize 2024, is the final novel in a trilogy about masculinity by Argentinian writer Selva Almada, following on from Brickmakers and The Wind That Lays Waste. The International Booker Prize recognises the skill of both writer and translator by dividing the prize equally between them, and we see the skills of both working together from the start here. The novel opens with a powerful image of three men fishing. They’re in the final moments of landing a huge ray, Enero at first glimpse dominant in this struggle, standing firm on the boat, stocky and beardless, swollen-bellied, legs astride, his physical presence reflected in those short staccato syllables. The masculine narrative voice is there straightaway with El Negro alongside the boat, water up to his balls, extending to the landscape—those hard consonants and dull vowels of the river, pancake flat.

Enero and El Negro, both now fifty-something, have come to the island on a camping and fishing trip, with a younger man, Tilo, the son of their old friend, Eusebio. They hang up the now dead ray on a branch, like an old blanket hanging in the shade .The narrative switches between all three of them, remembering past trips as they crack open the beers. We’re reminded that though familiar with the island, they’re not from there. When El Negro ventures into the woods for kindling, he inadvertently treads on a twig and the noise is deafening….. announcing the presence of an intruder. Their outsider status is underlined further when local man Aguirre turns up with his gang. Seeing the dead ray, he initiates a little rivalrous sparring about how many bullets it takes to kill one, before lighting up slowly and taking position proprietorially on the shore.

Interleaved with the story of the fishing trip are flashbacks, recollections from all three men, that give us some insight into their past. We learn that Enero, El Negro and Eusebio were friends from boyhood, spending long days by the dam, lazing around under the trees, fishing, chatting, reading comics, flicking through the magazines full of naked women and crimes stories. There are scenes from their young adulthood too, their antics now featuring heavy drinking and casual sex. Its consequences are part of their story, when Eusebio tells his mates that he’s having a kid with Diana, when Enero sends the girl he’s knocked up to have an abortion, she miserable and ashamed, Enero utterly indifferent.

After some early foreshadowing, the details of Eusebio’s accident are revealed, and the narration opens up to give us the response of Diana and young Tilo to the tragedy. There’s also a shift in the narration that conveys a sort of whole community response to the tragedy:

Ask around and anyone will remember Eusebio’s accident. The first stirrings: sounds like someone’s gone missing, there’s a search on. Then the panic: what if it was this person or that, plenty of folks were out fishing that weekend, it was a national holiday, the beginning of summer, word was the fish were frolicking in the river like butterflies.

This community, this group response, is echoed elsewhere in the book, when the three main protagonists are identified as a group rather than individuals: their close embrace while drunkenly dancing, their names all beginning with E, the not entirely clear account of who had Delia for a mother, who was brought up by his sisters—I had to reread passages to get this straight. And then there’s the layout of the dialogue on the page, the speaker always coming after what’s said:

Christ, she’s ugly!

Says Enero, slapping his thigh and laughing. The others laugh as well.

Fought us pretty hard.

Says El Negro.

as if any of them could be saying it, as if they’re almost interchangeable. And women, for these men, are interchangeable too. El Negro’s sisters, long hair, tall and slender as herons—even he couldn’t tell them apart.

The women enter the narrative some way in, around the time we learn of Eusebio’s accident. There’s Diana Maciel, who returned to the island to take over her father’s hotel when he died, and her best friend Marisa, Tilo’s godmother. There’s Siomara, horribly beaten by her father when she was a girl, now prone to lighting fires as a way of dealing with her anger. There are two young women, Mariela and Lucy, aged 15 and 16, who turn up at César’s bar on the island and catch the lustful eye of Enero having a beer with Tilo. Things get very sleazy when they start having a flirtatious banter, given that Enero must be old enough to be their father.

From this point, time frames seem to break down. It becomes harder to separate the fishing trip in the main narrative from different incidents in the past. Connections between characters are not immediately apparent and boundaries between the living and the dead are fudged. This seems of a piece with the superstition that’s part of life in this community: Enero has had a scary recurrent dream since childhood of The Drowner, his face pressing against the child’s, the soft grey flesh, cheeks eaten away by the fish so you could see the line of molars.It’s so disturbing that the boys seek help from Gutiérrez, the healer, to ask what it all means.

There’s some wonderful language in this book, and I loved the concision of the imagery: Enero’s feet are plump as empanadas, his mother frail as a leaf in her final days. I admired the clever plotting in the interweaving of the narrative strands. But I did find the misogyny and sexualisation of very young women hard to read. There’s a scene where Mariela is taken to Santa Fé by her uncle to buy a new dress, and all eyes are on her, looking at her with desire, at her uncle with envy. A colleague of Enero’s in a different town in the north was seeing a girl who could’ve been his daughter and she was pregnant with his second kid. I found myself clinging on to the female characters who were in any shape or form resisting the pattern of early sex followed by pregnancy: Gutiérrez’ wife telling Enero sharply to get the snip if you don’t want kids, that girl he abandoned, who then left for Buenos Aires, me, the reader, hoping she’d get some qualifications and a decent job. I realise, of course, that the novel is a critique of misogyny, but I could have done with just a few more signs that things don’t have to be this way. The novel is a very fine account of male bonding and behaviour in a poor rural community, but the misogynistic attitude towards women left a bitter aftertaste for me.

Many thanks to Charco Press for the review copy.

Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated by Zenia Tompkins.

There are two parallel stories in Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness. It’s the story of Viacheslav Lypynskyi, born in 1882, an important figure in the early 20^th century struggle for Ukrainian independence. It’s also the story of the narrator, a young Ukrainian woman, and a writer concerned with the way time consumes everything, not merely disappearing things and people, but leaving no trace of them behind. She reads about Lypynskyi’s death in 1931 in an old newspaper, and becomes intrigued by him, finding echoes of his life in her own. Both lives are explored in alternating chapters, with the struggle for Ukrainian statehood centre stage. And though there is disappointment, loss and misery in both narratives, the stories are leavened by a wonderfully rich vocabulary, by some simple but striking imagery and by that dark humour so characteristic of Ukrainian writing.

Lypynskyi shows his commitment to Ukrainian statehood from an early age. His family are Polish, living in the town of Zaturtsi , north east of Lviv and the young Lypynskyi has been sent to university in the Polish city of Krakow. His family are horrified when he returns from uni, insisting that his first name Wacław be spelled the Ukrainian way, Viacheslav,and, worse still, speaking Ukrainian which wasn’t even a language, just a rural dialect, a hodgepodge of Polish and Russian which they’d never heard emerge from the lips of an educated person, only from the local poor. This is just the beginning of Lypinskyi’s fascination with Ukrainian language and culture. He’s officially studying agriculture at Krakow, but finds himself spending more time in the Ukrainian Studies department, where he impresses his teachers with his grasp of the language. He develops an interest in Ukrainian history, not as far from agriculture as you might think, comments our narrator—after all, both disciplines are concerned with roots!

Truth be told, Lypynskyi is a classic polymath, his interest in history turning later to a passion for the new discipline of sociology, but his pursuit of ideas always in the interest of the cause of Ukrainian statehood. In a few vignettes, we are shown how revolutionary and objectionable this idea was to the Polish upper classes, including to his wife, Kaziemiera, an upper class Polish woman from Krakow. At that time, the territory of present day Ukraine was part of the Russian empire. They too, wanted to quash any ideas of Ukrainian independence and the Ukrainian language was banned in Russia until 1905. Even then, there was censorship. In 1907 when Lypynskyi edited a collection of poetry by the great Ukrainian poet Shevchenko, the Tsar’s censors sentenced him to 3 years’ banishment. Already ill with consumption, he fled west on a counterfeit passport and ended up in a sanatorium in Zakopane in southern Poland.

On the face of it, the narrator says, there are only three things that link her to Lypynskyi: the fact that she visited his home at Zaturtsi, the fact that he spent time in her home town at the end of World War 1 as an envoy of the Ukrainian state, the fact that they share the same birthday of April 17^th.  But there are echoes that resonate across the two lives in more subtle and diffuse ways, sometimes just by the repetition of a word or phrase. So, though she took Ukrainian Studies at university, the subject mattered less to her than the activity of working out information in detail, dividing up knowledge into individual branches and moving along every branch to its roots. (those roots again!). There are some resonances in their love lives. Both meet their future lovers in the university lecture hall. Lypynskyi, now lecturing, is transfixed  by the tall, dark-blonde student, Kaziemiera, rooted to the spot, till the janitor asks him to move aside in order to sweep up his dignity, splattered against the wooden floor. The narrator’s first lover is her lecturer too—the first of three, oddly resembling one another with their golden hair and blue eyes.

There are similarities in their desperate reactions when these relationships fail. Lypynskyi says he has a black abyss in his soul and later gives up salt in his diet, so that he can expel Kaziemiera from his memory, that memory of her emerging from the sea while honeymooning in Venice. He resigns himself to a life sans salt and sans flavour. A life without Kaziemiera. Our young narrator’s reaction is similarly dramatic: she can neither eat nor sleep—though there’s some self-mocking in her suggestion that everyone must have a bout of proper suffering at least once, just to show how big their soul is—XS, S, M or XL? Hers, she claims, is sizeless.  They both suffer breathing problems too: Lypynskyi chronically as a result of TB, the narrator during panic attacks. INHALE-EXHALE is an exhortation that appears regularly in both stories.

It’s well into the book that we learn about the narrator’s family, and are given a glimpse of life in Ukraine post 1931 when Lypynskyi died. It’s almost as if they’re taking up the baton of history, these ordinary people—it’s their turn now to speak. There’s Grandma Sonia, who was left on the steps of an orphanage by her father, telling her he was going to fetch some plum-butter pampushky. He never returned, dying of starvation in the gatehouse of a factory complex. This was 1932 and the start of Stalin’s man-made famine, the Holodomor. There’s Grandpa Bomchyk who grew enormous, weighing 150 kilos when he died. This wasn’t just because he came from a generation that didn’t find it necessary to exercise, but because his body was a receptacle for the accumulation of unutilized laughter. After toiling on the fields all his life, he owned nothing, having handed over his land and livestock to the collective farm after the Second World War. As the reasons for laughter grew fewer and fewer, his body began to increase in size. It simply swelled from a surplus of giggles that had yet to come out.  

Towards the end of the book the historical events come thick and fast, but the writer does an excellent job of outlining the fall of both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires and the complex situation in Kyiv, when this seemed a moment for the realisation of Ukrainian independence. Lypynskyi is watching this from Vienna, where he’s dispatched in1918 as the ambassador of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic. There’s a powerful account of Vienna at the end of World War 1, the grandeur of the buildings along the Ringstrasse contrasted with the desolation and hunger of the people: the green chariots jutting from the roofs of the government structures that lined the Ringstrasse looked like moss-covered crosses in littered, neglected cemeteries. The sombre mood in Vienna matched only by the misery felt by Lypynskyi at the failure of the movement for Ukrainian independence, a feeling of devastation that coated everything around him.

At first glance, this is a story of failed ideals, to be sure. But to my mind, these are dead and not yet buried.  Lypynskyi’s idea of territorialism, the vision of the inhabitants of a common land united in the interests of that land, irrespective of their ancestry, language, faith or occupation is surely still relevant today. I was moved by the narrator’s story, the coupling of her fascination with Lypynskyi with the revisiting of her own family’s stories, the show of strength in her visit to what remained of the Lypynski’s family estate. The discovery that his grave had been ploughed over by a random tractor driver in Soviet times, his bones dispersed. Yet not without trace: in this powerful and moving tribute to Lypynskyi, Tanja Maljartschuk has held him back from the jaws of that gigantic blue whale, Time. She has preserved him from Forgottenness.

This is a moving and compelling account of a tumultuous period in Ukrainian history, brought alive through rich characterisation, and wonderful language thanks to Zenia Tompkins’ flawless translation. But it’s also about the importance of memory. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Thanks to Bullaun Press for the review copy.

La Carte Postale- Anne Berest

On 6^th January 2003 a postcard arrives at the home of Lélia and Pierre. It’s an old postcard of the Paris Opera Garnier, with four names written on the back: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques.  These are the names of Lélia’s maternal grandparents, her great aunt and great uncle, all murdered at Ausschwitz in 1942. At the time, the narrator, a young woman of 24, didn’t have the time to ponder too much on this postcard turning up out of the blue at her parents’ house. It’s only 10 years later, when she’s heavily pregnant, that she starts thinking again about the people on the postcard— as if the awareness of new life somehow makes her feel more connected to those people in the past.

When she asks her mother to talk about the family history, Lélia warns her it’s a récit hybride, a story based on a mixture of documents and hypotheses, not yet complete. And hybride is the mot juste here, because Anne Berest’s book is a mixture of family history and the broader history of the Jews in 1930s and occupied France. It’s an investigation of the narrator’s own Jewish identity, and touches on anti-semitism in France today. But it’s called a roman, a novel, rather than a memoir, because there are sections of fictionalised, imaginary experience which take us beyond the dates and numbers: the child’s intoxication at the exotic sights and smells of pre-war Lotz, the pain and desperation of the women prisoners at Pithiviers as they’re separated from their children. And it’s also a kind of detective story, as the narrator does keep coming back to that postcard, determined to find out where it’s come from, who sent it.

The first section, Terres Promises, Promised Lands, is the longest and most detailed, dealing with the diaspora of the family Rabinovich from Moscow, where Ephraïm was born. After spending time in Riga and Palestine, the family arrive in Paris in 1929, where they settle down, work hard, and are keen to integrate into French society. Ephraïm finds work as an engineer, Emma teaches piano, and the two girls, Myriam and Noémie, enter the prestigious Lycée Fenelon in 1931, aged 12 and 8 respectively. They arrived in France two years previously, speaking not a word of French, and by 1933 are winning the top academic prizes in their year. They have a younger brother, Jacques, born in 1925, who is not allowed to have a bar-mitzvah—Ephraïm is a secular Jew in any case, but has also applied for French nationality, and does not want their application muddied by what he calls des rites folkloriques.

Alongside the family’s successes during the 30s runs the worrying thread of increasing anti-semitism in Europe, particularly in Germany. Ephraïm and Emma are told of the rise of the Nazis there, and large numbers of German refugees appear in Paris, including Ephraïm’s ex-fiancée, en route to New York, who advises him to get out like her. Ephraïm cannot believe that Jews would be persecuted in France and stays put. In 1939 Hitler marches into Poland and by June 1940 France is under German occupation. By October Jews are banned from public office, work in theatres, cinema and the press, and are also required to register at their local town hall.

To some extent life for the two sisters goes on during this first period of the occupation. Noémie continues writing her novel, and Myriam has fallen in love with a handsome young man called Vicente Picabia, whom she’s met in the circles around the Sorbonne, where she’s studying philosophy. But by June 1941 their world is closing down: a numerus clausus is introduced, limiting the numbers of Jewish students at the Sorbonne. The Rabinovitch family leave Paris to go to their country house at Forges, near Evry, and it’s there that Noémie and Jacques are arrested in July 1942. By this time, the Germans are arresting and deporting foreign Jews. Myriam has married Vicente and is registered in Paris. She’s at Forges when her siblings are arrested, but hides in the garden, and they don’t look for her as she’s not on their books. She cycles back to Paris.

Noémie and Jacques are taken to the transit camp at Pithiviers and there’s a harrowing account of the conditions in that camp. Lélia refers to doctor Adélaide Hautval who worked at Pithiviers, survived the war, and wrote a book subsequently called Médecine et Crimes contre l’Humanité. She and the narrator take some small crumb of comfort from the fact that Noémie appears in the book, chosen by the doctor to be her assistant, a role she performed tirelessly and with great compassion: elle marquait les gens partout oú elle passait/ she touched people wherever she went.  But this didn’t save her. Noémie and Jacques are deported to Auschwitz where they die. Jacques is murdered in the gas chambers, Noémie dies of typhus. Their parents, after repeated attempts to locate their two children, are arrested in October and die in Auschwitz in November 1942.

This is the kind of book where you need to build in reading pauses and the end of this section is certainly a place to lay the book on one side while you take a walk in the fresh air. The next section, entitled Souvenirs d’un enfant juif sans synagogue/ Souvenirs of a Jewish child without a synagogue is less harrowing. It takes place in 2019, 16 years after that postcard landed on the mat, when the narrator’s child says to grandmother Lélia On n’aime pas trop les Juifs à l’école/ They don’t much like Jews at my school. Anne ( the narrator) begins to question what it means to be Jewish. She was brought up without religion but with the values of the soixante-huitards, the generation of ’68, equality and human rights for example, and is completely at sea when she’s invited to a Pessah dinner at her new partner, Georges’, where the rituals of Pessah are observed. She talks with friends about their experience of anti-semitism growing up and learns from Lélia that though the camps were recognised immediately after the war, a blanket of silence then descended until the 1980s. Her friend Gerard tells the extraordinary story of a family gathering he attended as a child, where he noticed a row of numbers tattooed on the arms of several older people. When he asked his mother about them, she told him they were the seniors’ telephone numbers, tattooed on their arms lest they forget.

Her child’s comments set Anne off again on the trail of the postcard. She engages the help of handwriting experts which leads her back to the village of Forges and the house belonging to the Rabinovich family, sold on by Myriam in 1955. During her visit there with Lélia there are some tense scenes as they ask neighbours about the family, and what happened to their furniture and possessions after the war—they get the feeling people know more than they’re letting on. And there’s a deeply moving moment when they discover the piano that surely must have been Emma’s in a neighbour’s sitting room. Anne imagines Emma sitting on that piano stool, turning to them, saying, ‘You’ve come at last. What took you so long?’

The final section is titled Myriam and is the most novelistic. It’s set initially in rural Provence, in the free Zone, which only remained free of course until November 1942, when the Germans took over the south and then occupied the whole of France. There’s a lot of interesting historical detail about the growth of Resistance networks, particularly after the introduction of the STO (Service de Travail Obligatoire) but the narrative focus is on Myriam’s life hiding out in a small cabin in the mountains. She’s joined by her husband Vicente and Yves, a distant cousin of his, also in hiding, and the narrative focuses on this unconventional ménage à trois, where the two men spend their days buddying up, rather to the exclusion of Myriam—scenarios imagined, I guess, by the writer, trying to make sense of what later happens to these three characters.

We return to a more historical focus towards the end of this section, with Myriam going north to look for her family. She finds her letters unopened on the door mat of the house in Forges, and goes to the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, which from April 1945 served as a reception centre for detainees returning from the camps. The walls of the hotel foyer are covered with photos of loved ones deported, and the place besieged with those desperately hoping to find their family. Yet the detainees arriving were barely recognisable, emaciated, skeletal, heads shaved, as if beings from another planet. Paris was utterly shocked and unprepared for the condition of those returning and Myriam, of course, never finds her family.  

One of the threads that stands out for me in this novel is the attitude of the French to the deportations and the undercurrents of anti-semitism. There’s the shocking collaboration of officialdom: the French authorities who suggested deporting the children before the Germans did, because they couldn’t be doing with children hanging round in the camps after their parents were taken. Then there’s the mayor of Forges, keen to get the Rabinovich family off his hands. There’s the discomfort of Myriam’s friends when she’s handcuffed and arrested in Paris for breaking curfew, replaced by indifference or resignation as they turn back to their drinks.

There’s a sense throughout of the long after effects of the deportations and murder of the Jews seen here through the character of Myriam, the sole survivor of her family, and her subsequent relationships. Lélia tells Anne that she never once heard her mother utter the names of the four family members that she lost. This silence was damaging to their relationship, as was the fact that Myriam left Lélia with a village foster mother for two years after the war, when she went to work for the French authorities in German Lindau, still hoping to find her family, or at least to find out what happened to them.

But there is a sense that we’re moving on from silence now. When Anne and Lélia return to Forges in 2019, the young mayor tells them that a class of lycéens are researching a school project on the Jewish children deported from their school. He’s aware that the names of the four Rabinoviches don’t appear on the village war memorial and promises to rectify this. And of course there’s this novel itself, telling the story of Ephraïm, Emma, Myriam, Noémie and Jacques, as well as recounting the process of uncovering her family history and what that means for the narrator, Anne Berest. And for those of you who are still wondering who sent that postcard, we do find out in the end. I’m giving nothing away though-you’ll have to read the novel and find out for yourselves. It’s available now in English translation by Tina Kover, the paperback due out in May. The book is achingly sad, though, so I advise a box of tissues and regular walks in between.  

Vengeance is Mine-by Marie Ndiaye, translated by Jordan Stump.

The protagonist of this deeply unsettling novel is Maitre Susane, a young female lawyer practising in Bordeaux, who has recently set up on her own. She’s rather surprised one day to be consulted by a man called Gilles Principaux to act for his wife in a high profile murder case. The wife has been charged with the murder of their three children, and Maitre Susane, a young and, truth be told, under occupied lawyer, is surprised he hasn’t gone to a more experienced colleague.

During their first meeting, she gets the feeling she’s seen him somewhere before, and it gradually dawns on her where that was. She thinks he’s the son of a wealthy woman who employed her mother to do the ironing many years ago. As a ten year old, she went along with her mother, and was invited by the slightly older son into his bedroom while her mother worked. There, something of great significance happened, though she can barely recall exactly what it was. She thinks they had some sort of conversation in which she was rather brilliant, which led to her later choosing to become a lawyer. Though she can’t exactly remember if that was the case, or if indeed this Gilles Principaux was that teenage son. And we learn later that her father has an entirely different memory of what happened to her on that day, in that room.

The theme of unreliable memory is set up from the beginning. Maitre Susane has a close relationship with her parents, who live nearby, and she asks if they can remember that ironing incident and whether the family were called Principaux? They aren’t sure, and her mother’s attempts to recall their name surface several times in confused phone calls to her daughter. At the same time, as she’s preparing her client’s case, there are conflicting accounts of some quite basic facts: were the two police officers who came to the scene a female and male, or two males?

The second thread to the story takes place nearer home. It’s around the relationship between Maitre Susane and her new housekeeper, Sharon. She is presently illegal and Maitre Susane is acting on her application for legal status. She can’t proceed until Sharon provides her with her marriage certificate, which Sharon is inexplicably failing to do. Yet Sharon bends over backwards to make the home welcoming for her boss. Each evening all the lights are switched on, blazing a welcome for her boss’s return, and Sharon produces an array of wonderfully tasty dishes, far too much for Maitre Susane to eat, yet she does so in order not to offend Sharon. There’s an uneasy and shifting power relationship between the two women which is only aggravated when Maitre Susane realises Sharon is bunking off during the day to clean for a couple of other women, including one Madame Principaux.  How should she respond? Is this ok?

Into this second thread—or could it indeed be a third —enters Rudi, Maitre Susane’s ex, with whom she’s on amicable terms. We learn that they met while training, lived together for a few years, but separated because Maitre Susane felt she couldn’t reciprocate the passion he felt for her. He met someone else (whom we readers never meet), they had Lila together and she becomes a sort of step child for Maitre Susane, and rather weirdly, is often looked after by her parents—the granddaughter they never had. Rudy asks if Sharon could look after her one time, they all agree, but we readers feel a growing sense of unease at Lila being looked after by Sharon, especially when she’s taken off to other houses where Sharon cleans, and spends the night with her, almost abandoned by Rudi.

Now by this point in the novel, we’re looking not only at unreliable memory, but at unreliable, often conflicting emotions, which sometimes lean towards distortion. So, in her harrowing statement to Maitre Susane about what happened on the night she killed her children,  Marlyne Principaux talks of their beauty, and in the next breath she describes their death. Maitre Susane herself repeats oh too obviously how she loves her parents, then proceeds to break off with them when her father gets fed up with her obsessing about the Principaux. We know she found it impossible to love Rudi in the way he wanted, and there’s that mother substitute relationship with his child.

And this sort of distortion is expressed in changes in physical appearance too. So Maitre Susane becomes tall and strapping in puberty, cutting off her glorious mane of hair. Marlyne Principaux ‘balloons’ out while looking after young children at home. It’s Lila whose changes are the most scary though—Maitre Susane sees her coming out of the kitchen her skin grey, her body pocked, hammered, as if pushed in, deep beneath the surface of her face. By this time, The Exorcist is coming to mind. Though of course we know too, that Maitre Susane is now suffering some kind of illness/ breakdown, which may explain her distorted vision.

I have to say that I rather lost faith with this book in the latter half when things become more distorted, more surreal. There were several things going on that I just didn’t understand: all those tasty dishes, the importance of names, Maitre Susane’s illness and the sudden transfer of the action to Port Louis. In fact, there was just too much going on altogether for my liking, so the mental state of Marlyne Principaux, caused by her husband’s gaslighting, and the role of vengeance in the ghastly murder got rather lost in my view. This, and the almost unbearable account of the children’s death, mean that this is not a book I’d recommend. But this may well be a matter of taste: Mariana Enriquez praises the book as a disquieting, quietly beautiful novel in her blurb. I agree with the disquieting, not so sure about the quietly beautiful. But don’t let me put you off. The book came recommended on several lists at the end of last year and might well be on the International Booker Longlist. We’ll know on March 12th.

We would have told each other everything-Wir haetten uns alles gesagt- Judith Hermann

I was a keen reader of German writer Judith Hermann a little while back, loving her cool, distanced tone and elegant sentences. After a little gap since Letti Park, she’s come back into my life, through the excerpt of Wir hätten uns alles gesagt in the Granta 165 Deutschland collection, translated by Katy Derbyshire, and then through Tony’s Reading List, where he reviewed her novel Daheim.  I was so taken by the Granta excerpt that I decided to read the book in its entirety, originally conceived as a series of lectures on poetics. The book is indeed about writing, and the connections between life and writing. But it is also about what is said, and what is not said, and in exploring that Judith Hermann goes into her past, her family life and friendship group in a way which she didn’t expect when she started out.

The first section relates a chance meeting with her former psychoanalyst Dr. Dreehüs buying cigarettes in a late-night Späti in Berlin. They greet each other, he then disappears into a bar, the Trommel, along the street, (which her companion G swears they’ve never seen before) and she plucks up the courage to follow him in there. While she’s watching him and deliberating, she’s thinking about her story Träume in the collection Lettipark, where a woman is recommended an analyst by a friend, and once the analysis starts, the friendship breaks down. The story was based on the writer’s own friendship with Ada, a big character described in vivid detail, who arrived in Berlin from Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in those anarchic months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While reflecting on the ten years of analysis she went through, the writer tells us that Dr. Dreehüs  hardly spoke at all. She has more conversation with him over a drink in the Trommel bar than in the entire period of analysis. Though he did show a flicker of surprise when she tells him she wants to end the analysis. This is after the death of her friend Marco from multiple scelerosis, an event so final and real she cannot write about it or him in the same way as she can when writing Ada and controlling the narrative.

The characters Ada and Marco form part of what Judith Hermann calls her Wahlfamilie, her family of choice, the people she chose to spend time with as a young person, in contrast to her actual biological family, whom we meet in the second section. I like the fact that the first section’s focus on analysis primes us a little for this second section, as we’re going in deep here. The writer describes her unusual family, her depressive father sitting at his desk surrounded by papers, her mother earning the family income, working such long hours at a florists’ she wondered if she’d dreamed her, the family held together—just—by her beloved grandmother, who herself had fled Russia as a child in traumatic circumstances. The flat was piled high with boxes, papers and books. No one cleaned. It was a home with ‘an atmosphere’, unpredictable and difficult for a small child to understand, a place she couldn’t bring friends round to after school without seeking permission first. One escape for her as a seven year old was the dolls’ house that her father had made. There’s a beautiful, detailed description of this dolls’ house, which originally housed an entire family of wooden figures, of which only the figure of the girl, Ann, now remains. This house loomed large in the subconscious of the small child as well: the writer relates a dream she had as a child in which the house had secret rooms, wall hangings covering secret doors, all of which she now sees as expressing the family secrets her father kept from her.

The third section takes us closer to the present day. It’s the pandemic and Judith Hermann has moved to the countryside, to a house at a safe distance from the summer house inherited by her grandmother, where she would invite her Wahlfamilie to spend the summer back in the day. (Though as she’s musing on her family not talking, keeping secrets, she also reflects on the fact that in those years spent with her friends, they didn’t really talk to each other, either). She’s quite contentedly spending time on her own during Lockdown, writing. The only person she but does spend time with is Jon, a photographer friend. He’s taking photos of paintings and art works in the local Schloss for a project whereby one of the art works is projected onto the external walls every night during Advent, for the local people to enjoy during Lockdown. I loved this account of people coming together, creatively, to enjoy their community’s treasures. But of course, for the writer it’s also about what’s inside being brought to the outside, to the surface. By now, we readers have learned more about her father’s breakdown, his mental illness and years of hospitalisation. So it feels like a real breakthrough when Judith is finally able to speak to Jon about this and the toll it’s taken on her. And though she describes their efforts to understand one another often as talking past each other, she’s determined to keep trying. That’s what writing and life have most in common, she says, einen neuen Versuch machen—trying again, having another go.

This is a beautifully written and moving book about the connections between life and writing. About how silence and secrets in lived experience translate into writing which has gaps, which has things left out, but which often leave a kind of afterglow, as when someone leaves a room and you can still sense their presence. It’s also a brave account of Judith Hermann’s own upbringing and family life, and the effect of those complex relationships on her and her writing. The Granta excerpt was translated into English by Katy Derbyshire, and I’m looking forward to her translation of the whole book sometime soon.

Sisters in Arms by Shida Bazyar translated by Ruth Martin

The writer Shida Bazyar told us at the recent Goethe Institut event that Sisters in Arms, longlisted for the German Book Prize 2021, was partly inspired by Erich Maria Remarque’s book Three Comrades. She’d been intrigued by the pull of the ‘buddy’ novel that seemed to fascinate men, and wanted to explore what a novel about female friendship would look like. The novel tells the story of Saya, Kasih and Hani who grew up together in Germany, and who’ve come together once more to celebrate a friend’s wedding. We, the readers, are straightaway pulled into their world by a text prefacing the novel, written in tabloid newspaper style, which has one Saya M in the frame for a politically motivated arson attack—and which sets the tone of unease for the rest of the narrative.

The three friends all come from a Migrationshintergrund: they have foreign roots, though where they come from exactly is deliberately withheld from us by the playful, teasing, and sometimes accusatory narrator, Kasih, whose presence looms large as she erupts into and fades out of the narrative. We see what this means for the characters, both in their lives as young adults over the few days they spend together around the wedding, and in the anecdotes and flashbacks to their childhood and adolescence. These are linked associatively—the narrator deliberately rejecting an idea of order imposed by others—but give us a vivid, moving, and sometimes humorous picture of the girls growing up on the estate, the cramped flats with their smell of feet, old wallpaper and dried herbs. There are stories common to kids everywhere: going round to the flat where the parents are out to watch TV in peace, sneaking outside to pore over Bravo, with its Dr Sommer sex education column. But there’s an awareness, too, of their difference from the homegrown Germans: Saya’s mother had been in prison for her beliefs, Saya’s complicated feelings when her three visiting aunts in hijabs are stared at in public, the three girls telling classmates they’re going on holiday when in fact they’re going to stay in the flat of some family friends to watch TV for a fortnight.

We’re told that Saya was always the boss of the three and indeed this charismatic and provocative character always made up great stories. She still has this gift: when they come together for the wedding, Saya has the others in stitches recounting the reactions of her fellow airplane passengers to a woman in a hijab—which turns out to be just a headscarf to keep the rain off after all. But there’s another part of the plane story that is more consequential: the man sitting next to her who assumes she can’t speak German. When he accidentally drops his passport she catches sight of his name and finds out later via social media that he’s a Nazi. We’ve been told that this very week a group of Nazis are on trial in Germany for the planned and systematic murder of Muslim women, so this encounter only adds to the underlying feeling of social tension. And Saya can’t let it go. She’s not only constantly scrolling and following the trial day and night, but starts messaging Patrick Wagenberg under a false profile.

Now, it’s not all about Saya. As I said, the narrative goes back and forth between past and present, and some of my favourite set pieces are in Hani and Kasih’s stories. There’s social satire in the accounts of Hani’s workplace: an NGO that reconciles animal rights with consumer capitalism, its right-on team rejecting hierarchies, yet somehow overlooking the fact that modestly- paid receptionist Hani is doing the annoying fine-tuning on her colleagues’ projects as well as cleaning the sticky oat milk off the milk frother. Another thread is Kasih’s ongoing friendship with her ex, Lukas, whom she meets up with when he offers to help her find a job. She’s a little in love with him still, but knows there’s no hope as by this point Lukas’ hormones were partying elsewhere—I loved the pithy rendering into English here—and she’s left, a puddle of tears in a tracksuit. And Saya, with her strong views, doesn’t hold back from telling them what to do. She orders Hani to demand a pay rise, is outraged when Kasih is advised to apply for a job in Migrant Services. Our sympathy wears thinner when she interrogates Shaghayegh on why she’s getting married, and is utterly unrepentant about keeping Kasih’s flatmate awake with drunken talk and laughter the night before his exam. Strong views, or uncompromising? There’s some clever and nuanced characterisation here, which, together with careful and measured plotting, is utterly compelling and keeps us fully engaged on what is to come.

The denouément is the wedding and the night of the fire, when a block of flats goes up in flames, and many lives are lost. For UK readers there are sad echoes of Grenfell, and for Germans there will be echoes of the racially motivated arson attacks at Solingen and Mölln.  I’ll say no more about the activities of our Sisters In Arms that night. You’ll have to read the book to find out what they were doing, and how Saya has become the victim of the tabloid press. You’ll also discover that our narrator Kasih has been a little unreliable. When asked about this at the Goethe event, Shida Bazyar said people who didn’t look like homegrown Germans often found they weren’t believed, that their stories were dismissed. As Saya says, her role was to throw provocative statements into the ring and argue fiercely with everyone….not to be right about things. So why not write a narrator who is unreliable and inventive? I saw this as narrator Kasih taking control, whether withholding information from her readers, or by telling their truth, the truth as she, Hani and Saya see it.

This is an immersive novel about casual every day racism that challenges our expectations and holds our attention with its superb and pacey storytelling, the tone excellently rendered in Ruth Martin’s translation. The personal story is underpinned by a deeply worrying account of the rise and influence of the far right in contemporary Germany that should make us all sit up. Yet it’s also about friendship–the deeply sustaining nature of the protagonists’ long friendship, that friendship that goes way back, that binds them together in fun times as well as adversity. The only advice Hani’s mum gave them as teenagers was Stick together! and that’s just what they do.

Essays like Poetry- In Case of Loss by Lutz Seiler, translated by Martyn Crucefix.

Since hearing Lutz Seiler read at Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival last year, I’ve been keen to learn more about his home state of Thüringen in the former GDR, and in particular the uranium mines that dominated the landscape and lives of so many people there. The essay collection In Case of Loss is illuminating on this, as well as on Lutz Seiler’s own family and upbringing: he looks back at his past, on memory, change and transformation. But across the individual pieces it’s also an account of his development as a poet. He discusses the work of German poets Peter Huchel and Jürgen Becker, and their influence on his writing, as well as describing, often with humour, the long and arduous journey of the poem onto the page. And the essays work like poetry: there’s an elegance of language and expression, an intensity of focus, and often a beautiful structural arc within the essay which work together in this wonderful translation by Martyn Crucefix.

In Under the Pine Vault we see Lutz Seiler settling into his new home on Hubertusweg in Wilhelmshorst outside Berlin. It’s the former home of the poet Peter Huchel, and as he walks around the house and garden, he’s aware not only of Huchel’s presence, but of other former residents too, like the Red Army officers, who used the house as their HQ in 1945. There are wonderful lyrical descriptions of the pine trees bordering the garden, but so close to the house, they stretch above it, they dominate it. The sense of time passing is echoed in the house and garden through the seasons: in summer…the quality of light in the branches shifts endlessly. Light falls through budding leaves in a palimpsest that towers over us and around us, slowly shifting with the sun in the course of the day. There’s an awareness of sound: the clanking of freight wagons from the nearby railway lines, the beating of pigeons’ wings, and again, those pines, the rain stirs a growing murmur in the vaulting pines, a sound that envelops us, while, up above, the breeze passes. And he tells us of his own creative process: standing, looking at the house from the edge of the forest, staring at the bark of a tree, what is familiar enables me to absent myself. It is then things begin to come to mind.

There’s a lovely movement in the essays between this account of his creative process and his personal lived experience. In Aurora he says a poem can take seven years to develop from the glimpse of an idea to full maturity. We see this play out in In the Anchor Jar when, frustrated that a poem isn’t working, Lutz Seiler remembers the jars his family used for preserves in the cellar, ribbed glass jars made by the Anchor company in Saxony, used each year to preserve and store the deluge of fruit from the garden. In the knowledge that preserving changes the taste of the original fruit, he cuts up his draft text, stuffs the pieces in the jars and leaves them for seven years. When he finally takes them out he realises the words had not been forgotten, that they’d all been used over the years in other poems.  I had preserved; I had set aside, yet nothing had been lost to the writing…the words had taken their time till their text had emerged.

The sense of time passing is present in The Tired Territory, where village life in Thüringen is described. These were known as the ‘tired villages’, due to the constant lethargy and heaviness experienced by the residents. Many of them worked in the uranium mines, developed by the Soviets after the Second World War, and were exposed to radioactive material. Most of them died before the age of 65, including Lutz Seiler’s grandfather, Gerhard Seiler. There’s a chilling account of this grandfather coming home after work and wafting his hand above the radio. Instantly the music faded into an otherworldly crackling and hissing. When he took his hand away from the box, the haunting subsided. His childhood landscape of spoil heaps and tailing ponds has now disappeared, leaving only a show mine, a kind of tourist experience. The road layout has changed too. He remembers picnicking beside the road as a child, his father identifying the passing cars. Returning many years later, he sees his father’s fascination for cars as an expression of his longing for a different life in the West.

I enjoyed meeting those parents again, the parents I’d met not long ago in the novel Stern 111—we see that old radio again, incidentally, brought along on the picnic. His father features in the essay Sundays I Thought of God, one of my favourites, not least because of the beautiful shape of the piece. It starts with the eponymous poem in which he describes the electricity substation where, as a child, he thought God resided. He then relates the Sunday morning ritual in their family, when he and his father would walk past the church, with its summoning bells, down to the garages where their beloved Zhiguli car was kept. They would spend the morning servicing the car in meticulous and routine fashion. By the age of seventeen or eighteen Lutz Seiler had lost interest in their alternative ritual. He’d turned to motorbikes and was more interested in riding than maintaining. But at the end of the essay, when he witnesses a ghastly accident involving electrocution, we’re taken back to that substation, back to that Sunday ritual: in his horror and powerlessness for the first time since childhood.. he… seriously thinks about praying.

There’s humour in these essays too. I laughed while reading Huchel and the Dummy Bridge at the image of Lutz Seiler reading poetry, confined to the cabin of the truck he’s driving on National Service, while the other young conscripts build a dummy bridge—even more when the bridge collapses within ten seconds under pressure from the current. And at the description of Professor Winter, in The Invocation, with his habit of lifting his long unibrow above the bridge of his nose in such a way that it resembled a little tent pitched on his forehead. That essay continues with Prof Winter wandering out onto the balcony while Lutz Seiler, the exam candidate, desperately and comically continues his learned regurgitation on Beauty, the content now disappearing, leaving just the reverberation of sound. Reminding him of the time he stood at the cornerstone as a small boy calling and calling for his playmates Kerstin and Andrea, the sound swelling, powerful and overwhelming, like a Mohican chieftain who had lost his people, he discovered a distinct pleasure in the invocation itself.

So this collection did indeed tell me more about Thüringen and those uranium mines, but those pieces are really part of a broader endeavour: exploring the influences and experiences that contributed to the poetics of Lutz Seiler. It does this brilliantly. Thanks to Martyn Crucefix and And Other Stories for bringing this to us. Thanks to Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival for that great evening with Lutz Seiler.

L’Elégance du Hérisson- Rereading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery translated by Alison Anderson

It’s been such a pleasure to reread The Elegance of the Hedgehog for an occasional book group I take part in. First published in France in 2006, it appeared in English in 2008, and was widely read at that time as I recall, (and even serialised on BBC Radio 4). There are two narrators: 54 year old Renée, a concierge in a posh apartment building in a smart Paris arrondissement, and 12 year old Paloma, the intelligent and privileged daughter of a socialist MP, whose family live in one of the apartments. We know from the outset that Renée is an unusual concierge: she’s an autodidacte who loves music, reads philosophy and literature, but conceals her learning from the snooty residents, shuffling between her lodge and the entrance hall way in an old pair of slippers, string shopping bag in hand. Paloma, too is an odd ball. Highly critical of the behaviour and attitudes of her bourgeois parents and sister, she feels life holds no future for her and so has decided to kill herself on June 16^th and to set fire to her apartment—making sure it’s been evacuated first—unless she can find something to convince her that life is worth living.

As these two narratives (in conveniently different font in both French and English editions) alternate and progress, we learn more about the lives, inner worlds and disaffections of our two narrators. In a tone that ranges from comic to bitterly excoriating, Renée describes the residents who pass by her lodge most days. I laughed at the picture of the pretentious food critic Pierre Arthens, his floppy necktie and leonine mane of hair creating a kind of tutu vaporeux around his neck. Stories of other residents and their uppity ways are shared with her Portuguese friend Manuela, who cleans in the block and has tea with Renée once a week. Renée muses on, and makes sense of, the disparity between her lot and that of the residents by drawing on characters from world literature, Proust and Tolstoy being two favourites. She’s well versed in philosophy too, and after a brisk résumé of the essential points of phenomenology, Kant and Husserl, she’s concerned for the existence of her cat Léon: does he exist in the real world at all, or just in her consciousness?

Paloma’s mission to find some meaning in life is recorded in two ways. There’s her Journal du Mouvement du Monde where she’s looking for beauty and harmony in the physical, material world, as a respite from all that intellectual activity and over thinking she habitually goes in for, and then her Pensées Profondes- Deep Thoughts. There’s some beautiful and moving pieces here: her description of the New Zealand rugby team and their haka dance, her feelings of being transported by the swelling sound of the choir. There’s comedy here too, as she describes the entanglement of the cocker spaniel Neptune and the whippet Athena outside the lift as a ballet, with all the physicality of a Bacon painting. Yet these tableaux are interleaved with cynical accounts of her family’s failings and hypocrisies: her sister dressing street to hide her bourgeois background, her dad feigning resignation and regret when he puts his mother in a home, her mum watering the house plants as a displacement activity while spending years in therapy and on meds. Each section ends with her weighing up whether this is or isn’t enough for her to defer her 16^th June plan.

While the two narratives alternate, Renée and Paloma don’t actually meet until later on in the book: it’s as if they’re two residents of the building just passing on the stairs. Yet their themes connect in different ways, their sharp cynicism towards their fellow humans being just one. There are other echoes across the two narratives, as Renée describes in detail the Japanese tea ceremony, and Paloma starts her next passage with her father’s morning coffee ritual. There’s an awareness of animals in both narratives, ranging from philosophical musings on humans as part of the animal world, to acute and witty observation on how those urban pets behave. I loved Renée’s description of cocker spaniels, moving as if with little springs beneath their paws, like a petit navire aimable, a jaunty little vessel, bringing a delightful nautical feel to the place. But the other important theme which appears in both narratives is their love for things Japanese. Renée is a great admirer of Japanese films, and Paloma of manga comic books. Which paves the way for the major plot development—the arrival of M. Ozu on the block.

The appearance of this wealthy Japanese business man stirs things up on many levels. There’s the brazen nosiness of the other residents, desperate to see what his obvious wealth amounts to, in his swift refurbishment and transformation of this French apartment into something, well, decidedly Japanese. But there’s his immediate connection with Renée too, as he realises she’s an educated and cultured woman and invites her to his place for dinner. There’s comedy as she gets dressed up for this big night with the help of Manuela and hilarity when she gets stuck in the loo, details of which I won’t divulge further as it’s a scene that’s really worth reading. Weaving through their developing friendship, though, is Renée’s intense awareness that this is all new for her, she’s never known this kind of intellectual friendship where ideas, music and humour are shared late into the night. It’s M. Ozu too, that introduces Renée to Paloma towards the end of the book. Finally our two lonely intellectuals meet, recognise each other as kindred spirits and enjoy friendship. For a while.

This is a clever and witty book that works on several levels. It’s social commentary for sure, with the disparaging attitude towards Renée as concierge at the beginning of the book emblematic of the fixed class divisions in French society. As a counterpoint to this, it makes the case for a more open globalised world, firstly through the cultural interests of the characters—those shared moments with Tolstoy—but also in the arrival of M. Ozu who, as an outsider, simply ignores class divisions in reaching out to Renée. For me, there were undercurrents of other stories which surfaced: just briefly, just fleetingly, there was something of my prince will come in Renée’s friendship with M. Ozu. More substantial and enduring were the elements of the Coming of Age novel in Paloma’s self-absorbed and merciless criticism of her family. There were times when I wanted to shriek ‘For goodness sake, give your mum a break!’ There’s a lot to think about here—and that’s before you get on to the philosophy. It’s a book that requires some focus and concentration, but was for me an engaging and rewarding book to read again……I’m looking forward to the discussion.

Magnificent Rebels-The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf.

Andrea Wulf has written a terrific book about the writers, thinkers and philosophers based in the German town of Jena at the end of the 18^th century. From around 1794, for a decade or so, these brilliant and creative thinkers met in salons, lecture halls, at the local tavern, to read, discuss and argue, to write collaboratively, to symphilosophise, developing the ideas which would become those of the Romantic movement. Through vivid characterisation, the writer paints a compelling picture of the individuals involved, often bringing out aspects of their life and work which were new to me. But with a broader brush she stands back from the individuals to portray the social conditions of the time—the arduous journeys, the prevalence of irremediable infectious illness—as well as the tumultuous historical changes they lived through. The French Revolution, its hopes and its Terror, were just behind them, followed by the rise of Napoleon, whose devastating military campaigns determined their lives, as it did the lives of all Europeans.

Contemporary readers may ask why Jena—after all, to us there are other, better-known German cities that would seem more likely candidates for the cradle of German Romanticism—why not Dresden, why not Berlin? One aspect of the historical context Andrea Wulf excels in, is describing Germany and its cities at the end of the 18^th century. This was of course pre German Unification in 1871, when Germany was made up of many smaller kingdoms and dukedoms. So Berlin at that time was the capital of Prussia, a small provincial capital, highly militarised, culturally poor, and without a single university. Jena, on the other hand, had the flair of a city despite its small size, and a university with a unique governance structure. Four different Saxon rulers had to agree on all matters, making rules difficult to enact and enforce. As a result, there was considerable freedom for teachers and academics, and censorship was comparatively lenient. There was no university like it in Europe and it operated a magnetic pull for revolutionary thinkers of the time.

One of the first to be discussed is playwright and poet Friedrich Schiller, who obtained a position teaching history and aesthetics at the university in 1789. From about 1794 he was visited in Jena on a regular basis by Goethe, who lived in nearby Weimar, but was overseeing the construction of the botanical garden in Jena in his role as Privy Councillor for Duke Carl August. They discussed, edited, and collaborated on one another’s work over several years, and this involved not only strictly literary matters, but reflections on science, nature and humans’ relationship to both, which was an essential part of Romantic thinking. Andrea Wulf cleverly threads their evolving friendship through the book, really bringing out the polymath that Goethe was: the breadth of his personal interests, as well as his often onerous civic responsibilities.

Schiller’s role in bringing together the Jena set was in founding the journal Horen. This was to focus on art, culture, philosophy and poetry, with the express aim of avoiding political discussion. Journals were of course the main way of disseminating new writing and ideas at the time, and it was collaboration on the journal that brought the Schlegels to Jena in 1796. Andrea Wulf gives us much fascinating detail on the background to this colourful couple, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Caroline Böhmer- Schlegel, but it was in Jena that they worked on their magnum opus– a verse translation of Shakespeare’s plays. We’re given a vivid picture of their collaboration on this, Caroline drumming out the metre on the table as they worked, completing 16 plays in just over 5 years. It was the success of the German translation that reawakened interest in Britain in Shakespeare, and we’re told that the Schlegel translation is still the standard edition in Germany today. However, the Schlegels’ contribution was just as much Caroline’s salons, where writers and thinkers gathered together to discuss ideas, to talk and argue. The pull was at least in part Caroline’s dazzling personality: highly educated, fiercely intelligent, brilliant and witty, she was a tireless hostess. And it was her work, as much as her husband’s, that was published both in Horen and the Allgemeine Literatur- Zeitung—under his name.

Andrea Wulf does an excellent job in outlining the personalities and ideas of the philosophers involved in the group. There’s just enough of Kant and that Ding-an-sich to help us understand the evolution into Fichte’s world view, where the individual, the Ich, is seen as having Free Will, revolutionary for a people whose every move was controlled by the laws and whims of despotic rulers. Then we have Schelling with his views about man and nature being part of one whole universe. And this alongside the poet Novalis, who was all about feeling, awareness of one’s feelings as an individual in the midst of nature. The far-reaching influence of this can be seen in the English Romantics, WilliamWordsworth for example, and there’s a neat analysis of Wordsworth’s poem Tintern Abbey, where we’re not just given detached descriptions of nature, but the poet’s own emotional response.

Many members of the group carried ideas of individual freedom into their personal lives and defied conventional norms and expectations of marital fidelity. Alexander and Caroline von Humboldt had Caroline’s lover living with them for several years. Caroline Böhmer- Schlegel, prior to marrying August Wilhelm, had become pregnant by a French officer on a one night stand in Mainz. She later conducted an affair with Friedrich Schelling while still married to August Wilhelm. Dorothea Veit divorced her husband in Berlin and followed Friedrich Schlegel to Jena, where they lived unmarried for some years. For the women, of course, this came at a price. Caroline was fiercely criticised by the more conventional women of Jena, though we’re left with the impression she couldn’t care less. Dorothea, however, by divorcing, ran the risk of losing everything: custody of her two sons and her financial security. Her status was not helped by the publication of Friedrich Schlegel’s erotic novel Lucinde. Based on their love affair, it contained, amongst other things, explicit descriptions of their lovemaking with the woman taking the dominant role. In the storm that followed, it was Dorothea who suffered the most.

 This liberal attitude in sexual matters, the articulacy, wit and sensitivity expressed in letters and diaries, particularly from Dorothea and Caroline, made these characters seem almost modern to me, as if just in the next room. An impression doubtless enhanced by the writer’s vivid characterisation and story- telling: just when one is tiring a little of the Ding-an-sich, she opens the next chapter with the splendid entrance of Friedrich Schlegel in the salons of Berlin, or the horrific-sounding surgery suffered by Novalis’ poor fiancée, Sophie von Kühn, which really refocuses the mind. Goethe and Schiller, old friends to a Germanist of my generation, were brought to life for me here in a way I hadn’t encountered before. At other times, one has no doubt that this was indeed a different age: the presence of illness everywhere, the medical treatments, bizarre to us modern Europeans, the heart-rending loss of children in infancy.

This is a truly splendid account of these Magnificent Rebels and the times they lived through. Meticulously researched, with copious notes, bibliography and index to help one tell ones Schlegels from ones Schellings, there are also images of many of the key players, and even drawings and engravings of Jena and Dresden at the time, which I found myself turning back to again and again. It’s a book for Germanists, and all those interested in the development of European thought, which will really deepen your understanding of the beginnings of the Romantic movement. It’s also a terrific read. I can’t recommend it highly enough.