Amin Maalouf: Balthasar’s Odyssey

     I’ve just re-read another of my favourites by Amin Maalouf, and find myself wondering what it is I find so captivating in his writing. The socio-cultural and historical essays such as Adrift I find very interesting not just because his analyses largely concur with mine, but because they are far-sighted and take me out of my limited Western perspective and comfort-zone. With the novels, it’s different, and I’m beginning to wonder if this is to do with the nature of storytelling being different in other cultures; I’m not widely-enough read to judge at the moment.

I cam to Maalouf via Samarcand, then Leo the African, then this book. The settings are exotic, in the sense of a historical past, either in what we would have called mediaeval times, or else the Renaissance, and located in the Middle East, and the European parts of the Muslim world at those times. There are also usually characters from all three religions of the book, living together reasonably peacefully and tolerantly (within the parameters of their age), so perhaps Maalouf is looking back to a golden age in more ways than one, compared with our times. There is obviously an overlap – wishful thinking? – with his non-fiction.

This story is set in 1665-66, with overtones of the year of the Beast (666) and end times; there is a mysterious book which comes into and leaves the possession of the narrator repeatedly, which allegedly tells how to learn the mysterious hundredth name of God (according to the Qur’an there are ninety-nine) which will bring about transformation. Our narrator ranges the known world in obsessive pursuit of the book, which brings calamity in its wake; even in his possession and open in front of him, somehow it is impossible to read more than a few pages…

Maalouf’s characters in many of his novels are seekers, wanderers about the world; they are thinkers and they meet other kindred spirits on their travels and discuss religious and philosophical notions. Not only questing after truth, they are also on personal journeys of self-discovery and seeking happiness. Balthasar is 40 – significant, perhaps – seeking a book, love, a purpose for his future. I think this is one of the aspects of this novel, and Maalouf’s writing in general that appeals to me: there are real ideas and insights woven into the fiction.

There’s also something in the style of the story-telling: it’s first person, done through dated journal entries, so at one level there’s the potential for it to be fairly dull in terms of no suspense or changing viewpoints. But it’s not, it works in the sense that it’s the mind of his character that Maalouf wants us to know, and there is suspense via the gaps between the journal entries, and the unexpected changes of location of our narrator. It’s definitely not a Western novel as most of us might understand the term. In a way, it’s how some of the earliest English fiction was crafted; perhaps Maalouf is deliberately imitating something like Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year?

Finally, there’s a kind of meta-fiction here too, a book about a book or books, such as we find in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, in various of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories, in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind or in Gilbert Sinoué’s Livre de Saphir. There are books containing hidden or arcane knowledge for those who care to look or seek it, although perhaps not with the obsessiveness of the hero of this novel.

There’s a lot here. It’s not the average, evanescent stuff of much contemporary fiction – this is the third time I’ve read and enjoyed the novel, and it’s gone back on my shelves for the future.

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

I really liked If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, and have read it a couple of times. I wondered why I’d never read Invisible Cities, and something else I was reading recently re-awakened my interest and prompted me to get it and finally read it, and it was marvellous. The concept itself is astonishing: a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which the traveller describes a range of imaginary cities to the great Khan in a series of prose poems. All the cities are named after women, fall into a range of different categories, and are woven symmetrically into the whole. Interspersing the nine chapters of the book are conversations between the pair, reflecting on a range of connected ideas.

I found myself very quickly reminded of Jorge Luis Borges in a number of ways. Firstly, the writing is in short sections or chapters; like poetry, each deals with a single subject, or here, city. And the slightly magical, slightly ethereal style is also reminiscent of the great Argentinian writer, although, of course, my judgement is limited as I can read neither in the original.

Each city is different, disturbing, dislocating; each contains enough in itself, in its own story, to shake you up, make you reflect and ponder. Some will truly enchant you, others will hardly move you at all. At one point the great Khan realises that in each city Marco Polo may be describing a different aspect of Venice, his home city; equally he is contemplating aspects of our life journey in the world. Sometimes a city verges on the truly surreal, in a way in which the language itself seems to lose its meaning – rather along the lines of Ben Marcus‘ bizarre The Age of Wire and String – you read the words, and they are words you can comprehend individually, but the ways in which they are related to each other challenges perception…

Each city is its own prose poem: the cities are weird and the magic of Calvino’s words and images conjures up vivid if implausible, unreal or insane places, at times in a drug-like haze. Many of the places have a very seductive appeal, and even though the travels are going nowhere, for these places do not exist, the magical and haunting lyricism of the cities timelessly suspended in eternity carries you along in a trance.

How does it work? We listen to an intriguing story-teller; we are in the territory of myth; we are travellers visiting unknown places along with him. Words create vivid pictures, and ideas make us think. The ethereal nature of the places and the encounters carry us effortlessly along… and yet there’s more to it than that. It’s a lovely book, and I don’t use that word about many books.

On reading – or not reading – fantasy (continued)

And then I remembered Philip Pullman, and Philip Reeve and Jorge Luis Borges, and therefore needed to think a bit more…

The Northern Lights trilogy is surely fantasy – it’s certainly not science fiction in any extrapolative sense that I know, and yet it’s also anchored in our reality, in the sense that it’s set in a parallel universe (or even several of these) resembling our own but different in key ideas, too. So there is an Oxford University that’s not quite like the one a couple of hundred miles from here, and the idea that humans can have souls that are creatures and physically visible is intriguing, fascinating even, but definitely not within the realms of the possible or probable. Philip Reeve’s rapacious mobile cities are a marvellous setting for his novels. And Borges’ imagination is utterly out of this world, flights of fantasy and imagination that are vertiginous, bizarre, thought-provoking… and lightyears from reality. The Library of Babel contains every book that has been and could be written in its myriad rooms, and, thanks to a computer programmer with an imagination, can actually be visited here.

So, I’m at least partly back with my choices and my prejudices here, having been used to looking down on fantasy as being less serious than real science fiction, or any other form of literature. Having had my fill of Tolkien at a very early age and never having felt moved to bother with Harry Potter (cue gasps from various directions) I’ve sidelined a whole genre. Just like I’ve sidelined various other kinds of writing which you haven’t read me blogging about, and about which I’m now old enough to use the feeble excuse ‘I don’t have the eyeball time for that…’

More seriously, now. The Name of the Wind was slow to start and took a long while to get into, but once I did, I found myself enjoying it much more than I expected to. Most of the novel is actually ‘backstory’, its narration rather crudely contrived, but well-told and engaging; when the real story occasionally intrudes, it’s much cruder and less interesting. It was a good yarn, escapist, with some interesting characters, encounters, rivalries and so forth. I wanted to know what happened, so plot drew me inexorably to the end. What the book didn’t do – couldn’t do? – and what I think left me ultimately unsatisfied, was to make me think. Because the characters and their adventures, entertaining as they were, didn’t really matter to me. There are clearly intended to be several more very long volumes in a series, but I was not convinced that the writer fully knew how he intended to develop or conclude his story.

To try and flesh this judgement out further, I’ll draw a comparison with The Northern Lights. The idea of, the possibility of parallel universes I find fascinating: how might they be just oh so slightly different from our own? The idea of sin or evil being seen as physical matter in the ‘dust’ and its link to the ideas of innocence and experience in the Blakean sense nags away at me each time I re-read. To be able to shift from one universe to another. The idea that organised religion is some overt conspiracy to enslave the mind and spirit, that we may perhaps seek to free ourselves from. I know I oversimplify grossly here, but these are exciting ideas to wrangle with, and Pullman draws me in, interests me, makes me really care about all his characters, and leaves me gutted as the hero and heroine part forever… this is fantasy of another order. And I cannot get away from the feeling that it’s because Pullman’s novels are somehow connected to and anchored in our world even while not being of it, that engages me so deeply…

Jorge Luis Borges: The Total Library

I like Borges: he’s another wonderfully learned, eclectic writer like Umberto Eco, who, of course, paid tribute to him in The Name of the Rose by naming the blind librarian Jorge… He’s an essayist in the spirit of Montaigne, too, offering thoughtful and provocative disquisitions on a wide range of subjects. I’ve read and enjoyed his collected short stories a couple of times, and decided to venture into his non-fiction.

In his early writings, you can see just where some of the later stories were going to come from: the ideas, the thinking is the same. There are some curious book reviews, and thumbnail portraits of various authors. Here, Borges is both compelling and perceptive, precisely because he zeroes in on his subject-matter from a very individual, and usually totally unexpected viewpoint. In a review he can demolish a book and a writer in very few words – Aldous Huxley comes off very badly – and equally swiftly praise writers such as Woolf and Faulkner. Joyce‘s Finnegan’s Wake is damned completely in less than a page, and he comes back to this stance on that novel a number of times in different places… Edward Gibbon and Walt Whitman also come in for some fairly fulsome praise.

I often reflect on which writers and books will stand the test of time, and it’s interesting looking at these reviews, a lot of which are from the 1930s and 1940s: some of the titles and writers we still recognise, whereas many have vanished without trace. He has, for instance, a curious and quite deep regard for GK Chesterton, whom almost nobody reads nowadays.

A good deal of the content of this collection is, however, rather dated, and presumably of some academic interest to students of Borges’ work; the good bits do need some searching out, but they are certainly here. His essays on Nazism, and Germany in the Second World War are very interesting. I’d never heard of Biathanatos, a defence of suicide by the poet John Donne; I was surprised by his liking of (some) science fiction, including Ray Bradbury‘s Martian Chronicles, and there’s a really good essay on the Shakespeare authorship controversy, from 1964, which was the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. That one is both sensitive and quit sharply focused and interesting on language issues. The most moving essay is probably on his blindness and what he felt he shared with other writers who had lost their sight.

The Total Library is a Borgesian concept, a library containing every book which can be written, not only in every language, but in every non-language as well; it features in one of his most famous short stories The Library of Babel, and thanks to the internet and its possibilities, someone has actually created it and you can go and play with it here.

 

 

A limited acquaintance: Latin American writers

My acquaintance with the literature of Latin America is very limited: I’m familiar with some of the novels of the Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the short stories of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. I tried Mario Vargas Lhosa and found him impenetrable, and gave up on the acclaimed Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes; I don’t think it was my loss, either…

Marquez I have grown to love; One Hundred Years of Solitude is on my list of best novels ever; I return to it every few years and never cease to marvel. What is magic realism? It’s almost the literary equivalent of a drug: normality is there, in the characters, their lives, actions and speech, and then, imperceptibly it has happened: you are outside the frame of the real, things have an enlightened, extra edge or perception to them, sometimes a great warmth, welcoming and pleasurable. It’s seductive, more-ish, a totally different perspective on everything. Marquez gives us the (hi)story of a family, a town and an epoch, and it blows me away… the ending is truly astonishing.

As time has passed I have become more fond of Love in the Time of Cholera; perhaps it’s an older person’s novel? A tale of enduring unrequited love, magically sustained long beyond what seems possible, and eventually attained, a marvellous and exotic setting, beautifully described, again taking us beyond the real so subtly that it takes a long while for us to realise what the author has done…

Others have also wandered around in the territory of magic realism; I’d put some of Gunter Grass‘ fiction in this category, but I feel increasingly that there is something specifically Latin American about it, and that Marquez really did invent and develop a new genre.

Borges is so utterly different, enigmatic and sometimes utterly twisted, one eye on eternity which he knows is incomprehensible, but her just won’t leave it alone. Some of his stories might be compared with the drawings of Escher. He’s preoccupied with libraries and the organisation and categorisation of knowledge; the mad blind librarian Jorge in Umberto Eco‘s The Name of the Rose is that writer’s tribute to Borges… Could all knowledge, every permutation of every letter and sign, ever be contained in a storehouse? Borges prefigures the immensity of the internet, and a website I discovered recently, the Library of Babel, tries to replicate what Borges imagined: warning! – the website may mess with your head.

Hardly a representative sample of Latin American literature: others of my readers out there may correct me, but I’m interested that the continent has given us two such different writers, writing things that perhaps Europeans never could.