Olga Tokarczuk: The Books of Jacob

     ‘Literature is a particular type of knowledge, it is… the perfection of imprecise forms.’ I love that.

I’ve been waiting a couple of years for this one finally to come out in English, and I resisted buying the French translation a year ago because I wanted Jennifer Croft’s English version. She’s translated other Olga Tokarczuk novels so well, and I was not disappointed here: she creates atmosphere and tone consistent with her other successes, and I felt I was reading the same Olga, if you see what I mean. Not knowing Polish well enough to read it means I can’t comment on the ‘feel’ of the translation, but this doesn’t alter the fact that translators are really important.

Nor is it possible to summarise the plot of a 900+ page novel, so I shan’t even attempt. Suffice it to say it centres around an eighteenth century Jewish heresy in Eastern Poland led by Josef Frank, who presented himself as the Messiah and urged his followers to accept Christian baptism. Wikipedia is your friend here if you want more details. The whole is also set against the backdrop of the beginning of the collapse and dismemberment of the Polish Commonwealth. But there’s so much more besides, with Tokarczuk’s familiar erudition and digression on display throughout. I found myself thinking at one point, is this Poland’s take on magic realism, with her blend of history and fiction?

I have to admit that this book will not be to everyone’s taste, as the arcana of Judaism and Jewish history is pretty pervasive; at times it all felt a little rambling and self-indulgent, but this did not put me off. It is a book to lose yourself in, a bit like Flights, where you are never quite sure where you are heading next. I thought of Tristram Shandy at times, the endless shaggy dog story; sink into it and go with the flow. It took me a fortnight.

You would have to say it’s a particularly Polish novel, with the focus on time and place, as well as a religious novel in some ways. There is the concept of the Messiah to wrestle with: Christians have had one, but the Jews not, so how will they know when theirs finally comes? And because considerable parts of the novel are set on what was then the border between the Polish Commonwealth and the Ottoman empire, Islam, the third religion of the book, also figures a good deal.

It’s very easy to see why traditional Polish Catholics hated and denounced this book on its publication. Tokarczuk is genuinely interested herself and through her characters in all sorts of heretical and semi-heretical notions; it’s a philosophical and theological minefield for a Catholic reader, as she validates elements of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And interestingly, too, when it comes to the Catholic Church interrogating Josef Frank and his followers to see if they are genuinely seeking to be united with the one true church, the questioning style and behaviour of the inquisitors is – deliberately – reminiscent of the behaviour of Communist party interrogators during various purges, as they have been recorded in history books. The atmosphere is sinister, threatening, ominous; the Church has spies and agents everywhere, just like the KGB…

And then there are the scenes – based on history – set in Catholic Poland’s holiest shrine at Częstochowa. We are shown religious ignorance and trickery on both sides. In the end, for me, some of the most interesting and intriguing parts of the novel were those broader explorations of the meaning of religion, spirituality and the human future in the context of eternity.

Clearly it’s not a book for everyone. If you’re curious, I’d say go for it, but it’s a challenge. It’s evident why Olga Tokarczuk is a Nobel class novelist, for what that’s worth, with this as part of her complete works. I intend to read it again, hopefully in the not-too-distant-future.

As an ex-English teacher I’m a stickler for correctness, and there were quite a few bizarre typographical offerings in this version, particularly in the area of hyphenation, where I thought there were established conventions, but hey…

Olga Tokarczuk: Flights

     I’ve lately grown rather despondent about fiction written in English; either I’m not encountering interesting and innovative approaches, or there aren’t any. Certainly I find much greater satisfaction reading novels from other lands, normally in translation. For my money, Olga Tokarczuk really deserved the Nobel Prize: she pushes the boundaries. I returned to Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead recently, and now I’ve just re-read Flights. That’s not a particularly good translation of the title: the Polish title translates as ‘Extremes’ in the sense of from one place to another, and the French version is called ‘The Pilgrims’, which doesn’t really cut it either…

It’s about travel, movement, in place and time, physical and metaphysical. Much of it is fiction, some is digression, philosophical musing, if you like, some is historical documentary, almost. There’s no clear line from A-Z through the book; the sections are feel associative, if anything. And it’s fascinating! There is a goodly selection of weird maps illustrating or intervening in the text; I was astonished to discover that they came from the Agile Rabbit collection, which I was given for Christmas many years ago.

It takes a bit of work, because you don’t really have a framework or pattern to slot the book into from the start. It’s a challenge; it’s not compulsive, page-turning reading, yet you’re intrigued enough to carry on, rewarded enough mentally, curious enough to find out where Olga’s going with this one. Do the digressions intervene in the story-telling, or is it the other way around? The psychology of the fictional characters is certainly compelling enough. Where does the stuff about the plastination of bodies, or about dissection in the eighteenth century, actually fit in?

So, Olga Tokarczuk has done something new with the ‘novel’ here, with fiction, with writing itself, I think. This is welcome in the days when, as I said earlier, the form feels rather tired and hackneyed, and there seems to be a dearth of writers prepared to experiment and take risks with doing new things. Here is originality of form and approach, here is mental stimulus and thought-provoking, here is good writing, well-translated, demanding the reader’s input, engagement and attention.

Flights is enigmatic, indefinable, marvellous… definitely worth your eyeball time!

Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead

   I’ve re-read this one for our book group, and decided to focus on what might be the qualities in Tokarczuk’s writing which make her a Nobel Laureate – not that that particular accolade is a guarantee of anything. You can read my first take on the book here.

The heroine and narrator lives in a remote village in the mountains close to the Polish/Czech border. She immediately comes across as rather strange, for her world-view is deeply dependent on astrological interpretations of events and people, and she has a strong sense of animals having rights in the same way as humans do; as the novel progresses, Tokarczuk succeeds in having us empathise with and eventually respect and like her, as well as see the logic and the sense in such a response to the world.

This world picture is fully developed in the sense that the narrator takes it and us along with her wherever she goes, and she is always philosophising and reflecting on the world and trying to make sense of it in her own terms. Her rage at hunters and killers of animals knows no bounds, and a series of deaths – are they murders? – of locals connected with hunting form the core of the events and the mystery at the heart of the book: our suspicions grow as we wonder if the narrator is connected with them, and we look for gaps in her awareness and her narrative…

I shan’t give any more away. The book is eminently readable, though not gripping in the usual sense. In the end, the qualities I especially admired were the subtle sense of place she creates, the astonishingly conceived plot, the carefully developed characterisation, and the artistry in the writing, which of course I can only appreciate through the work of her excellent translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Lloyd-Jones’ work must have been extraordinarily difficult, as a side strand of the story concerns the narrator and a friend of hers attempting to translate some of William Blake’s verse into English, and comparing versions; that would work in a Polish text, obviously, and here the translator makes it work for English readers too!

It’s well-known that right-wing and religious circles in her country do not like Olga Tokarczuk, and when we read the episode where she heckles the local priest during his sermon on St Hubert’s feast day (patron saint of hunters) it’s easy to see why: her reflections on the sacrament are highly provocative. In the end, taken along with other of her work, including the equally astonishing Flights, I can see why Tokarczuk received the ultimate accolade.

Svetlana Alexievich: Last Witnesses

This is a book I don’t think I can bear to read again, so harrowing is the subject-matter; I was conscious of deliberately distancing myself as I read it. Svetlana Alexievich deservedly won the Nobel Prize for Literature a couple of years ago. This Belorussian writer is determined that there are certain things that must not and will not be forgotten; she has collected testimonies from those who dealt with the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet women who fought in the Second World War, those who remember life in the Soviet Union, and here, the children who lived through the Second World War.

She collects testimonies – a couple of pages, up to half a dozen; there are no questions, the witnesses remember, and speak, reliving their trauma as they do. In this book she tell us the name of the speaker, their age when war broke out in 1941 and their current profession. She took over twenty years collecting these testimonies. There are some who have challenges her methods and suggested she edits to exaggerate effects; I’m sorry, but faced with testimonies like these, I do not have time for such nit-picking.

It’s a truism that children suffer the most in a war. Here, we learn just what they did have to go through in this most brutal of wars, invasion by the Nazis, who regarded Russians as subhumans and treated them as such. There are so many random killings, so many slaughters of innocent villagers in revenge for partisan attacks, burnings of villages, torturings; there are children who live in the forests with partisans for years. So many orphans: small children see their parents gunned down, unable to comprehend. And – though I thought I was inured to this, but I wasn’t – so much random sadism and viciousness by German soldiers.

I’m not going to go into any more detail than this, apart from to mention one particular detail: the testimonies of starvation, particularly from children who managed to survive the 900 days of the siege of Leningrad. Peeling off the wallpaper to suck out the glue I just about coped with, but I was genuinely speechless when I came to a section titled ‘We ate the park’… some children, evacuated after the siege to a small town, saw a park, swooped on it and devoured every bit of living greenery in sight…

Here in the privileged West we are accustomed to see Russians as dangerous, potential warmongers to be kept in check; we have no comprehension what it would have been like to live through such times and therefore no understanding of their determination to be secure enough for nothing like it ever to be visited on them again.

I can’t imagine any of my readers are wanting to read this book for yourselves, but if you do, I’m afraid my searches have not succeeded in finding an English translation. I wonder why…

August favourites #20: 20th century novel

I’ve been learning Spanish for the last few years, a retirement project I took on to keep my brain active and challenged, and I’ve been really lucky to have an excellent teacher and a very small class. I’d like to be able to read my choice of best twentieth century novel in the original; I have got so far as acquiring a copy, and because of my familiarity with the text, can make a stab at decoding a fair bit of the Spanish, but I think I’m still a long way before being able to enjoy Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Cien Años de Soledad – One Hundred Years of Solitude– in the original. Many years ago, when I was a teacher at Harrogate Grammar School, we had one year a Spanish language assistant who came from Colombia; it was shortly after Marquez had won the Nobel Prize for Literature and he was so rightly proud of his fellow-countryman that he translated the author’s acceptance speech for us and I still have my copy somewhere. It is a lovely book – I choose that word advisedly – magically carrying me through the story from start to finish, holding me utterly enthralled. I can’t recall how many times I’ve read it; I’ve worn out one copy and am on my second.

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

Writers in exile

I’ve picked up one of my all-time favourite novels to re-read (for the fourth time, according to my reading log) and I’ll write about it here in due course, but it has prompted me to think about the question of exile, and more specifically about its effect on a writer.

There are two kinds of exile, it seems to me, the voluntary and the enforced. A person can choose to leave their country of birth for many different reasons, to go and settle elsewhere; having made this choice, they can eventually also choose to return to their native land if they so wish. Or, someone can be forced to leave, by war or persecution. Such an exile does not always have the prospect of returning home at some point in the future. Or their home can actually disappear, as, for example in the case of those living in the eastern areas of the Second Polish Republic, which were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939. Where do you actually go back to, assuming you are allowed?

I have the impression that exile is largely a twentieth century phenomenon, a feature of powerful and totalitarian states able to exert control over people’s lives in ever-increasing depth and detail; I know that this may be an oversimplification, but it will nevertheless allow me to explore the idea.

Reading James Joyce‘s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I studied for A level, I remember being struck by how Stephen Dedalus becomes increasingly aware of the stifling nature of the church and its stranglehold over his country, most particularly over the minds and mentalities of its inhabitants: how does a free and questing mind survive, develop and flower in such a setting, where everything contrives to crush it at every turn, where things perhaps may be said, even written down, but never published or widely disseminated, where one is therefore likely to be rejected at every turn? So Joyce realised he had to leave; I don’t know whether he intended never to return, but he chose to go, and lived out the remainder of his life in continental Europe – France, Switzerland and Italy.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a cause celebre during my student days; ex-gulag inmate, his astonishing novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch was actually published during a brief thaw in the Soviet Union, but subsequent works were not: the excellent Cancer Ward and The First Circle appeared only in samizdat (works self-published, ie typed in carbon copies and illegally circulated from hand to had at considerable risk) in the Soviet Union and were regarded as provocation when printed abroad. And when he researched and delved into the entire Stalinist slave labour system in the several volumes of The Gulag Archipelago, the authorities had had enough; along with the Western provocation of awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature, that was sufficient for forcing him into exile. Cut off from his Russian roots, he seemed to become evermore eccentric and extremist, playing into the hands of cold-warriors in the USA, where he eventually settled; this did his reputation no good at all, and he does now seem to be falling off the radar, although the same is probably true of a great deal of the powerful literature that managed to emerge despite the efforts of the KGB…

Another epochal event of my younger years was the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1969; I can still remember my father whispering the news to me very early one morning just as he left for work… it was unacceptable for one country in the Pact to pursue an independent line which the Soviets did not approve of, and the Czechs had to be brought back into line, which happened, and many of its writers left. Milan Kundera ended up in Paris, where he has lived and written for most of his life, and Josef Skvorecky, whose amazing The Engineer of Human Souls is the book I’m currently re-reading, fetched up in Canada, where he taught English literature in Toronto as well as writing until he died a few years ago. It’s Skvorecky who, more than anyone else, conveys to me a powerful sense of what it means to be an exile…

I can’t conclude this post without a mention of the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz, who came from my father’s part of Poland, survived the Nazi occupation of the country, initially threw in his lot with the People’s Republic after the liberation, but eventually found its thought control too stifling and chose to leave. His exploration of the effect of totalitarianism on the way people think, The Captive Mind, is still powerful sixty years after it was written, and nearly thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union.

In terms of my initial taxonomy, Joyce left Ireland freely, Solzhenitsyn was forcibly expelled and stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and the other three writers I’ve used as examples didn’t actually have to leave – but what else could they have done? Writing for the bottom drawer was a possible activity, but writers usually write because they feel they have something worthwhile to say. How much do they lose by not being in their homeland?

to be continued…

Svetlana Alexievitch: La guerre n’a pas un visage de femme

I wrote about her most recent book here, and recall how I was stunned by it; this one is no different. And I find myself thinking hard about what exactly it is that she does so well. She doesn’t write fiction, and she doesn’t write history – at least not in the sense we usually expect history: with names, dates, places, facts, figures and accuracy. She listens, and records; she questions; she selects. And some question what her ‘selecting’ what to include does to what she writes about…

How is this ‘literature’, worthy of the Nobel Prize? How is it different from what we usually think of as literature?

Alexievitch captures the power of witness: these women lived the war, experienced it, suffered it; Alexievitch is collecting voices to preserve forever. And although even to read some of the things they describe is so horrifying I find myself thinking nobody should read this, yet none of this must ever be forgotten.

And here is where Western notions of literature and criticism part company with the Eastern. I read – very angrily – an American critic complaining, taking Alexievitch to task because she was editing, not reporting words verbatim, was re-arranging accounts, as if in some way this was ‘fake’ reportage, and therefore of dubious validity…

A woman focuses on women’s experience of war, during the Great Patriotic War. Women flock voluntarily to the war effort, girls lie about their age, resort to all kinds of subterfuge to take part in combat; they are partisans, resistance fighters, sharpshooters, snipers, aviators, as well as the more ‘traditional’ nurses and stretcher-bearers. Their bravery and selflessness is astonishing – no less than that of their menfolk, it is true – but in the West we do not understand this, we have no comprehension of what the war was like in those places. Here is real feeling, along with names, dates, places, some facts and some figures which somehow are not that important in what her interlocutors really have to say…

Many of the women recount the war in Belarus, and it beggars description. They return home to villages, towns where there are no males… I have not forgotten the experience, more than thirty years ago, of seeing the premiere of Elem Klimov‘s film Go and See at the London Film Festival. At the end, the entire audience – 1500 people or so – left in stunned silence. Not a word was said. The final caption on screen told us that 97% of Belarusian males between 18 and 45 did not survive the war.

Alexievitch is a different kind of writer, a listener and a recorder who lets her subjects talk; she presents testimony of times and places. There is no commentary, although occasionally she reflects on what she is doing or someone she has met, in a few paragraphs. And then the listening recommences. It’s incredibly powerful and important stuff. And be warned: you need a strong stomach.

Svetlana Alexievich: Chernobyl Prayer

I remember the disaster at Chernobyl happening thirty years ago. A major recollection is the Western attitude: it was crappy communist technology; it could never happen here. I’ve never believed that. And we are perhaps about to have new nuclear plants built here in Britain by the Chinese…

For complex historical reasons, a branch of my family found itself, not through choice, living in what was then the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the single territory most affected by the disaster. I have no evidence to link them with the disaster, but a couple of members of our family died unexpectedly young of cancer after the ‘accident’. There were stories of luminous rain at night at the time of the accident.

Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her writing last year; it’s easy to see why. This book is a series of monologues – obviously prompted by questions – from a wide range of people whose lives were affected by what happened. It is one of the grimmest and most harrowing things I’ve ever read.

It’s framed by two lengthy pieces from two women whose partners were some of those who went in at the very start, with no thought of the consequences to themselves, to mitigate the consequences of the accident. They both died, very unpleasantly. Other stories are just as chilling, in other ways: the two year-old who begged for his father’s hat, and developed a brain tumour. The little girl born with so many body parts missing or mutated that I could not believe someone like that could have lived…

Apparently the equivalent of the radioactive fallout from 350 Hiroshimas is distributed randomly over the territory of Belarus… But the most shocking thing of all, that comes across repeatedly, is that people cannot comprehend the nature of the silent, deadly disaster that has happened to them, and so they continue as normal. Belarus, after all, suffered horrendously in the Second World War; its people knew what war, disaster, horror meant. Here, they refuse to leave, they go back, they produce, sell and eat their crops; people loot, steal and sell stuff on the black market; the radioactivity is distributed across the entire nation and more widely…

The attempt to clear up is Pythonesque: everything is supposed to be buried, even contaminated soil… and there aren’t the resources, there isn’t the organisation to do any of this properly. It’s very easy to talk about communist inefficiency and corruption meaning that it was chaotic, but I cannot see how any country anywhere, faced with a catastrophe of this magnitude, would be able to cope sensibly and rationally.

Alexievich’s monologue format works really well: ordinary people are allowed to speak. Their intelligence – or their ignorance – shines through; their bravery, or recklessness and stupidity is evident. People’s loyalty to their country, and willingness to do whatever was necessary to tackle the immediate consequences of the accident is very clear; chaos and confusion only unfolds later on. She allows experts and lay people to speak, those ‘responsible’ and frauds, the young and the old. I read compulsively, fascinated and horrified.

This is a link to an article I came across just before I wrote this post:

Germany had so much renewable energy on Sunday that it had to pay people to use electricity