a cure for ADHD
Just when I thought that I was getting too old and that there were no real page-turners left for me in this world, I find a quite unexpected one, a novel inspired by and half the size of War and Peace. I had started reading Freedom almost a year ago, but the realist gossipy opening seemed like a drag, so I abandoned it. Deciding to give it another try recently, I’ve gotten so engrossed that I devoured it in a couple of days. It really made me forget about emails, facebook and all the time eaters, just like the author intended (he said that in an interview), I barely even turned my laptop on while I was sunk into the story of the Berglunds, a middle class family dealing with the usual personal problems, in the first decade of the 21st century. It shows the cycles of the generation gap, the dynamics of rebellion and conformism and how conformism is also a means of rebellion, it’s also about the mistakes we make, the complications of love and sex, ambition, but also selflessness, about youth and the sad, but sobering revelations of adulthood, but most of all about freedom and its entanglements. Freedom has become a commodity too much taken for granted by the Western world in the 21st century and the entanglements, paradoxes and limits of it become subtly evident in the everyday drama of the characters whose main struggle with themselves is to be “good”, each in their own different understanding of the term. Without being pretentious or too didactic, the novel shows the inescapable contradictions we are facing nowadays as citizens of the so called “civilized” world and how our best intentions are turning against us in the long run, how on a personal level we abuse our freedom and how that same freedom tears us apart draining us of ambition and drive, how the whole globalizing process of “making the world safe for democracy” by spreading the free market, middle class prosperity, liberal ideology is draining the world’s resources at a staggering pace, how we focus on petty struggles for power, while the environment we all depend on is dying out before our blind eyes. The most amazing achievement of the book however is that it manages to weave these huge themes in a very intimate story of love, marriage, friendship, adultery, betrayal and coming of age, very discreetly. While you’re turning pages to see who’s gonna sleep with who and whether some character is gonna kill himself or not, you’re also pondering the future of this planet and the legitimacy of the social order you inhabit to claim supremacy over others. It is a love song for the middle class family that also shows how disfunctional and destructive a model it can be, how we’re all gradually going to hell, but might as well love each other and try our best till that happens. It’s also a laugh out loud funny and heart-breathtakingly sad story, it’s both a dead serious and a deliciously self-indulgent read. I might have to get back to it with a clearer head later, but for the moment I’m still enjoying being under its spell.
the other side of terrorism
There are some books that I root for, I want them to be good because they seem to carry an important message that might get lost due to too little or too much artistry. The premise of Jasmina Khadra’s novel The Attack is enormous, it deals with the causes of Islamist terrorism from a Middle Eastern perspective. The author is an Algerian army official writing under his wife’s name. The novel itself is like bag full of good and bad beans that have been mixed together and it takes so much effort to separate the good beans that you just want to set the whole thing aside. The writing is seeped in linguistic cliches and melodramatic, I wonder if the translation had anything to do with that, and the first person narration in simple present was quite awkward, it felt like reading a bad movie script at times. But still, the topic itself drew me in and despite its lack of artistry, the novel manages to capture the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the type of terrorism that is fostered in this vicious circle of violence and retaliation on both sides and of two ways of life that threaten each other’s existence. Unlike Western authors like Don DeLillo, John Updike or Martin Amis who wrote from the perspective of a terrorist, Khadra uses an in-between narrator: the clueless husband, a successful Palestinian doctor working in Israel, whose world is turned upside down when he finds out that his wife is a suicide bomber. I was quite disturbed by the Western authors’ ease when claiming access to the mind of a terrorist and I think Kahdra’s more indirect approach, the investigation the husband gets involved into after the shocking event, is a lot more effective and politically correct. It showcases the difficulty a non-terrorist person encounters in his effort to understand a phenomenon that is so foreign to most of us. The same effect is achieved by Orhan Pamuk in Snow, a novel that is beautifully written and constructed at the same time.
wishful reading
I wish I had a book to read and get lost into that had the mood of these songs, a kind of sensual sadness, if that makes any sense:
the power of crowds
There is something about a crowd with an apparent common goal that is extremely moving and it triggers some kind of unconscious solidarity in me, like the Tahrir Square movement in Egypt that got me following the news with an interest I haven’t had in a very long time, but there is also the violent mob, the group dynamics that lead to an escalation of destructive violence, like the recent still unexplained phenomenon in Britain, which makes me cringe.
Two striking images supposedly stand as the starting point of Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II: one depicts a Moonie wedding, hundreds of identical couples getting married on a huge stadium and the other is of J.D. Salinger, the reclusive author ambushed by the paparazzi after a long period of absence. The first is an image of absolute conformity and the other of extreme individualism and it is these opposing ideologies that are both paradoxically part of what it means to be human and the tension between these two inner tendencies of belonging and of setting oneself apart that DeLillo deals with in the novel. I remember a critic dismissing DeLillo as a novelist by calling him something like “a Frankfurt-School entertainer”, meaning that he is representative for a type of novel that is idea driven, rather than character driven, that he deals mostly with socio-political phenomena rather than the complexities of human psychology like, say, Henry James would. To me asking DeLillo to be James is just plain pointless and the reason why I keep going back to DeLillo is precisely because he writes idea novels. Falling Man for instance is character driven, but Mao II is an idea novel and aside from Underworld it might be DeLillo’s best. It is prophetic in so many ways and it somehow prefigures, at the end of the Cold War (it appeared in 1991), the next big conflict, the rise of terrorism.
Despite his macho author image, I think DeLillo’s female characters are actually much more interesting and powerful than the male ones. It is of course easy to identify the voice of the novel’s protagonist, the recluse cult novelist Bill Gray, with that of the author himself, but that would be a trap. Bill enunciates some of the most quoted of DeLillo’s ideas, namely that there is some parallel between the work of a novelist and that of a terrorist, as they both conduct “raids on the human consciousness” and that in recent history the novelist is losing most of his power of influencing the public mind while the terrorist takes over it. This parallel only holds when one has a modernist conception of art, in which the artist is the genius that revolutionizes the way we perceive the world by making us look at it from a new and often times uncomfortable lens. A revolutionary work of art is in a way an act of violence. Another, more modest way of looking at art in the novel is embodied by the photographer Brita, who is commissioned to make Bill’s portrait after a very long absence from the public eye. She is an artist too, but of a different type. Unlike Bill she is not a tormented one that wants to change the world and tragically aware of the limits of this approach, but rather a witness to the wonders of this world, who modestly tries to capture all the beauty and pain and contradictions in her work. These might not be literature’s most psychologically complex characters, but who cares. I haven’t had such a thought provoking read in ages…
back home soundtrack
of cats and men
What would you do if you were 27 years old and you were invited to become the king of some obscure country you have never been to and with a language that you don’t know or understand? Mind you, this does not mean you get to hang around on a throne with the people around you worshiping the ground you walk on, but quite the contrary, most of the people around you aren’t sure if making you king is such a great idea and you have to create a new state almost from scratch while fighting the non-believers that surround you and waste no opportunity to attack you and the institution you stand for. This would be the over simplified version of the task King Karl or Carol I of Romania embarked upon at such a young age, leaving behind the familiarity of military life in Berlin for the unfamiliar new capital of a brand new country somewhere in Eastern Europe. The act itself seems worthy of a novel and Filip Florian did that in The Days of the King (Zilele regelui) using the perspective not of Karl, but of a young dentist from Berlin, Joseph Strauss, who was invited by the king to follow him in the new country, and also that of his poet tomcat Siegfried.
In this country torn apart between great empires and civilizations, Joseph Strauss and Siegfried the cat, but also the king, find a new and peculiar home. It seems like a well documented novel and those interested in a more easy to digest type of history lesson would appreciate it, but as one non-Romanian reviewer on Amazon put it, those that are totally unfamiliar with Romanian history, might find it a bit hard to swallow. The prose is beautifully crafted and the characters endearing, but there is a certain superficiality to them as well, this isn’t a character driven novel by any means, but rather a nostalgic sketch of what looked like a more innocent and hopeful age for Romania, as all beginnings should be. The simplicity and elegance of the writing are indeed rare, at least considering my (limited) experience with recent Romanian prose and I have particularly appreciated the warmth of the auctorial voice, which I find hard to describe and is probably connected to the book itself being something of a hedonistic pursuit of nostalgia.
Still, although I considered the novel a perfect treat and a great “back home” trip read, it left me slightly unsatisfied and wanting more. There’s something very promising and masterful in it, particularly in the clarity and simplicity, but there is so much more that I felt was only superficially dealt with, there is the promise of something great that is not quite there. The characters were not strong enough for it to be a character driven story, but there wasn’t enough of the age there and of the huge forces at play in the end of the century Romania for it to be a historical novel. It felt more like one chapter in what should have been something huge, a War and Peace kind of thing.
The good thing is that it left me wanting to read more Romanian literature. I’ve always felt I know too little about the literature of my own country and during the time when Terorista was writing I had a great source of advice in this respect. Now I found myself looking at the bookstore shelves with no idea what to choose, as I know very little of what’s new and good. Any advice?
back in the land of green plums
Returning to my homeland after a long time makes me go through the same cycle of feelings of attraction and rejection. In my mind, the longer I stay away, the better my country looks and feels like; it becomes my imaginary home, a shelter, the only place where I don’t get lost in translation, where people get my weird sense of humor, where tomatoes taste like tomatoes and last but not least where some of the most important people in my life live. The return is always sad and joyful, as I get to feel the love and familiarity I have long been missing, but I also get to relive the disappointment that led me away from there in the first place; the dirtiness, the hopelessness, the poverty that are intertwined and create a vicious circle we as a nation never seem to get out of. The people I love and admire the most are there, but they feel like tiny islands in a sea of dishonesty and vulgarity, which makes them even more precious to me. But even they, who are my last hope, have lost hope…
I remember feeling a tinge of hostility towards Herta Mueller’s fictional version of Romania, which is depicted as the embodiment of dictatorship and a type of corruption that leaves nothing untouched. Although I am aware that in her fiction the country is no longer the place itself but an epitome of repression, not a real land, but an existential one, I still couldn’t accept this totally somber vision of the society I too spring from, fictional as it may be. The first novel by her that I’ve read was neither in its original German, nor in Romanian, but in English and I remember being bothered by the translation of the title Herztier into The Land of Green Plums. Somehow, the more time passes and the novel itself fades from my memory, I am more and more taken over by this image of Romania as a land of green plums, which might have less too do with the actual book and more with my own projections. A land that keeps tempting me to have a taste of it once more, but then leaves a sour aftertaste in my mouth all over again… There is the undeniable beauty, but also the undeniable squalor:
fiction addiction 