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.

Do you really need another reading list? (part two)

Some thoughts on the rest of this particular list of novels by world writers:

Jaroslav Hasek: The Good Soldier Svejk. Heaven knows how many times I’ve read this and parts of it still reduce me to utterly helpless laughter. The Great War as experienced by a congenital idiot who can get himself into more scrapes than anyone can imagine, with superb original illustrations as an added bonus.

Vassily Grossman: Life & Fate. A serious story of the Great Patriotic War as it is known in Russia, and rated a twentieth century equivalent to Tolstoy’s War and Peace by many, including me. Last year the equally powerful prequel, Stalingrad, was finally published in its entirety, some sixty years after it was first written. It’s very strong stuff, and a salutary reminder of just how much the Soviet Union suffered in that war, and its massive contribution to the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany.

Josef Roth: The Radetzky March. So moving that it hurts, in places, this is another portrait of a completely vanished world, the Austro-Hungarian Empire as it drifts inevitably and disastrously towards the First World War. I recently re-read it so will just point you here if you’re interested.

Ernst Wiechert: The Simple Life. Some days, this understated and little known German novel is the best I’ve ever read. A naval captain, appalled by his experience of the Great War, gives up on society and the world and retires to the forests of East Prussia with a loyal follower, to lead a simple life. He discovers a new existence, with meaning and significance, finds happiness and/or contentment, and of course, sadly, this cannot last. Escapist? Possibly. Hippy-ish? Again, perhaps. But the lessons the captain learns are real and there for all of us to contemplate.

Amin Maalouf: Samarkand. This one feels like it’s on the list as a token gesture to literature from the Arab world, which I have explored much more since I originally put my list together. There’s the exoticism of the setting, the romance of a completely different culture, and the background is the famous poet Omar Khayyam and his poem, the Rubaiyat. But I think if you are only going to read one of Maalouf’s many novels, you should probably go for Leo the African, or Baldassare’s Travels. They are all magical, and at times remind me of Umberto Eco at his best. I’ve come relatively late to novels from this part of the world and there’s lots to explore.

Question: what is it about vanished worlds, and powerful evocations of them, that grips me so? For as I write this and reflect on what I’ve told you about a good number of the novels above, it’s clear to me that this is a common strand, and something that draws me and affects me greatly…

Another question: why are all my novels in this category – writers in languages other than English – all by male writers? I currently have no answer to this one, but it requires some thought on my part…

To be continued…

On historical fiction…

Yesterday’s review of Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account got me thinking further about historical fiction, and the limitations that authors work with as they write in this genre. I mentioned three novels, the one above, Amin Maalouf‘s Leo The African, and Gilbert Sinoué‘s Avicenne, which is about the life of the famous physician Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. Here, we have works of fiction about the lives of historically real characters. However, they all lived sufficiently far back in the past for many details of their lives to be vague or unknown, thus giving an author wide scope for invention. The history of the times when they lived is known and recorded to an extent, and the names of principal figures and places, and dates of historical events are also fixed. So this combination of known and invented seems to allow for a decent measure of convincing verisimilitude, although it’s perfectly possible that the real person was nothing like the character fictionally portrayed.

I then moved on to thinking about other historical fiction with which I was familiar, specifically novels set during the First World War: here, the situation is rather different. Firstly, the times are much closer to the present – only a century ago compared with five to ten centuries in the case of the novels I mentioned earlier. Events are recorded in much more detail, places and times known with a great deal of accuracy; accounts are available in memoirs and diaries from actual participants in the events. So, what is a writer to do? Sebastian Faulks invents characters in Birdsong, but sets them in detailed descriptions of real places and events. Pat Barker, in her Regeneration Trilogy, uses a mixture of invented and real characters – Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon figure quite considerably – and Erich Maria Remarque populates All Quiet on the Western Front with a cast of invented characters, and avoids detailed references to places and times.

These writers ‘get away with it’ or else, manage to convince us with invented characters, for several reasons. The canvas of events – the Western Front in the First World War – is sufficiently vast for a writer to be able skilfully to introduce her or his characters into certain events and places and weave them into the broader fabric, as it were: their heroes can blend in, particularly if they are not too high-ranking as to be in a position where they might have potentially been able to have a major effect on events (sometimes known as the butterfly effect). So, Faulks can introduce Stephen Wraysford as a mid-ranking officer because there were so many of them at the time, and he becomes just one of many, whose personal story we follow, and his interactions are all with other similarly convincing imaginary but plausible characters. The battle of the Somme was huge, so at some level Faulks’ participants all become stock representative characters, if I may put it like that.

Working with ‘real’ characters like Owen and Sassoon, Pat Barker sticks to creating a plausible account of their interaction at Craiglockhart, using available material to add credibility; the battlefield scenes involving Owen are again generic. And Remarque keeps everything in terms of detail vague: names of characters, location of the fighting, dates. The fighting itself is very convincing and realistic in terms of description, and he never needs to tell us much about whether particular actions were successes or not: we have a small group of men swallowed up by the enormity of events, and this is what he seeks to convey.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes stories were another work I considered. The setting is real – Victorian London, the times, the kinds of crime – though suitably sanitised and romanticised for a bourgeois magazine audience; it’s another broad canvas, so broad that the author can allow himself to invent a place or a building or a street as necessary. perhaps this might have jarred a little with purists at the time, but today we know no different. Against this background he can invent detective, police, crimes and criminals willy-nilly: as long as the background holds, it’s the plots that draw the reader along.

In the end, it is all surely about the realist myth which lurks behind all novels, not just those with the emphasis on the historical, a myth that every writer of non-fantasy has had to wrestle with since Defoe first marooned Robinson on his island… I feel another post coming on.