A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Dubravka Ugrešić: The Language of a Refugee in The Ministry of Pain

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the ministry of pain - dubravka ugresicWe’re coming back from Croatia today, so here, at long last, is a post on Ugrešić.

In an interview with James Marcus, Dubravka Ugrešić said The Ministry of Pain “is all about language.” Ugrešić uses language as a metonym for culture to express the complexity of Tanja Lucić’s identity in terms of her relationship with her homeland, Yugoslavia, and her language, Serbo-Croatian, “a subject that officially no longer existed.”

Tanja is a well-educated and hyper-articulate professor of Serbo-Croatian living in self-imposed exile in Amsterdam. She has difficulty processing who she is in the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, and because she is a professor of language and literature, she is able to articulate her experience best in the context of her language. Tanja experiences a kind of “linguistic schizophrenia” where “[t]here were times I felt like a student of Croatian as a foreign language” and she experiences her “native language as alien.” She is trapped in a no-man’s land between her native language, Serbo-Croatian, and the newly defined Croatian, unable to express herself fully in either. Language, which is the comfort of any writer or student of literature, has become her torment, and because this is a first person narrative, the reader is painfully aware of Tanja’s inability to define herself.

Tanja has lived in Berlin and Amsterdam and her husband is in Japan, but all of these places are temporary. She knows that because she cannot return permanently to Zagreb, she has no home anymore. Her identity belongs to a country, and a language, that has been divided like a schizophrenic mind. This foreignness of Tanja’s own language mimics the feelings she is having as a displaced person—a refugee. Because she comes from a country that no longer exists, she is unmoored and must create a new cultural identity for herself. “I sometimes feel that here, surrounded by Dutch and communicating in English, I am learning my native language from scratch.” She must also create her identity from scratch away from a home that was irrevocably changed.

Even in her dreams Tanja is best expressing her feelings through the metonym of language. She dreams of “a native language that had turned into three languages like a dragon with a forked tongue.” The dragon is a menacing figure and the image is of dividing something that was once one whole into parts that can whip and lash and hurt. The image evokes language emerging along with a dragon’s fiery breath. In another passage she recounts a dream where “I speak an unchecked, uncontrollable language, a language with a false bottom, whose words leap out like a jack-in-the-box and thumb their nose at me.” This captures her tenuousness as she finally begins to learn Dutch and integrate herself with her host country at the end of the book. Language can drop out from under her at any time. Words, formerly her intimate friends, can now jump out and mock her. Tanja is completely exposed in the area she was once most comfortable—language.

Language fails Tanja as returns to what remains of her native country for a short visit. The street names have changed in Zagreb and she can no longer navigate what used to be home. Of getting lost in familiar streets, she writes: “[t]he refugee trauma, the equivalent of the sudden disappearance of the mother from a child’s field of vision, had surfaced where I’d least expected: ‘at home.’” Tanja is stripped of all that is familiar to her. She has left behind her home and her language, but when she returns home—to the place that should bring the comfort of a mother’s arms—she finds it changed and is slapped in the face with how unmoored she truly is. When she discusses it with a man on the plane back to Amsterdam, the experience really comes alive:

“You had every reason to get lost….So many street names have changed”

“But the streets are the same.”

“Not if they have new names”

The renaming of the streets makes the change real. It is the act of naming, the words, that define the new Zagreb. The old names are being erased and covered up with new names just as Tanja’s history is being erased.

Language is explicitly political in The Ministry of Pain: “[a] language is a dialect backed by an army.” Tanja tries to broker a peace between the Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian in her classroom by focusing on the similarities of the Yugoslav peoples in the same way she has “no interest in dividing [Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian] up by the fifty or so words that distinguished them.” Though Tanja perceives the differences in her students, the “Zagreb way of talking,” she unites them with reminiscences about their childhoods in Yugoslavia and reminds her students of their commonalities. Tanja is returning her students in memory to the “happier” times when their ethnic factions had a common enemy. Though she cannot return to Yugoslavia, she can create a proxy in her classroom.

Tanja projects her own torment over language onto her students. Some of the students are integrating with their host country as their language is “being taken over by a half-baked English and, more recently, half-baked Dutch.” Nevena is “‘more comfortable in Dutch,’” “as if Dutch were a sleeping bag.” Shell-shocked out of their mother tongues, “[l]anguage was our common trauma” “my students had an easier time saying what they had to say in languages not their own.” This connotes Tanja’s concern that her students have lost their cultural identity, and the cultural identity she would like to ascribe to them and have them identify with along with her is Yugoslav.

Initially, Tanja asks her students to write in English because “using ‘our language’ would lead them to adopt a confessional mode.” She is afraid that if she allowed her students to use Serbo-Croatian, they would relinquish control of their emotions. What she finds is that “writing in a foreign language had provided an excuse for being dry and brief.” The students use the opportunity of writing in English to separate themselves further from their experiences and efface the vehemence of emotion associated with their linguistic differences. Later, Igor tells her that the students were trying to please her and that she never fully grasped what they needed. They were acting out her denial.

Tanja presents herself as a Yugoslav in exile, but her compatriots are acknowledging the division and therefore destruction of Yugoslavia and are finding new identities and new languages. Tanja laments the students’ loss of their culture. Even when implying that the survivors of the Balkan Wars will move forward, she forecasts a hollowness in their futures: “[t]hey will be linguistically gifted, speaking several languages and creating a Eurospeak of their own, peppering it with personal coinages.” Eurospeak is at once all languages and none. It has no homeland associated with it and what Tanja longs for most is a homeland. Ironically, Serbo-Croatian was itself a melding of languages, but Eurospeak belongs to the identity “European,” and in her heart, Tanja is Yugoslavian.

Violence is inherent in the imagery of Serbo-Croatian: “‘in other languages children sleep the sleep of the just and in mine they sleep the sleep of the butchered.’” Boban reminds the class of the inherent danger of speaking his mother tongue as he tells of his dream of being lost in Zagreb “‘afraid to ask for directions, because people would hear that he was from Belgrade.’” The reader wonders if in acknowledging this, the students feel the violence in themselves and between their cultures is inevitable. At the end of the book, Tanja muses: “I keep wondering whether a language thus maimed, a language that has never learned to depict reality, complex as the inner experience of that reality may be, is capable of doing anything at all, telling stories, for instance.” How does one rebuild a life in the ashes of a pogrom?

This violence manifests in the end, when Igor, a former student, ties Tanja up and holds her captive. He lectures her on the part language plays in culture and forces her to confront the alienation she is experiencing:

“[y]our course was about a culture that totally compromised itself, and you neglected to mention that fact….when you lectured on Andrić, you neglected to mention that the current cohort of culture butchers have chopped him in three….when you lectured on literary history, you neglected to mention that the Sarajevo University Library was bombed out of existence.”

Igor has forced Tanja back into seeing how her beloved language and literature are inseparable parts of the culture for which she has been pining. After he leaves her, she reminds herself that “there is only humiliation and the pain of endless memory.” She can no longer hide within her metonym, and she now has to live through the entirety of her loss. From the ashes of her cultural identity, she finally begins to build anew.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Ministry of Pain from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Bare Suffering of Elie Wiesel in Night

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night - elie wieselIn Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, the author describes the horror of his experience during the Holocaust with only the scantest details. The scant use of adjectives allows the reader to fill in their own worst fears and makes the story more poignant than shocking in its horror.

Wiesel grew up in an isolated part of Transylvania where the Jewish population was deported relatively late in the war. It wasn’t until 1944 that he and his family were removed to Auschwitz. But earlier in the war, there were indicators of the horrors to come, such as when one of the deported foreign Jews returned to Sighet and told Wiesel about what had happened to the rest of the deportees, “The Jews were ordered to get off [of the trains] and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed to a forest….Without passion or haste, [the Germans] shot their prisoners….Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets.” The events themselves are revolting, but that revulsion stems entirely from the action. The passage (including the omitted portion) contains only two adjectives: waiting (re: trucks) and huge (re: trenches). Wiesel is letting the events speak for themselves.

The description is similarly stark when Wiesel and his fellow travelers are unloaded at Auschwitz:

An SS came toward us wielding a club. He commanded:

“Men to the left! Women to the right!”

Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother….I didn’t know this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and [sister] forever.

He is remarking on the emotionlessness of the officer’s speech, and yet his own description here is emotionless. The emotion lies in the event itself—in the loss of his mother. He could have engaged in histrionics and described the horror of the loss, but somehow the flatness of the delivery and the lack of adjectives is more poignant than any full description could have been.

There are moments in the book where Wiesel elaborates on the description, but they tend to set scenes at the beginning of a section. For example, the chapter on his march out of the camp starts with these words: “An icy wind was blowing violently.” But the weight of the emotion in this chapter is not in the adjectives. This is how he describes the march: “The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot.” The one adjective, “excruciating” takes on so much weight because it rests alone in the passage. I was left with the feeling that while he fails to mention the degree of pain elsewhere, this pain must truly be awful to be described at all.

Often when people experience trauma, there is a deadness to the experience afterwards and Wiesel’s spare use of adjectives reflects that experience. But he is trusting a sympathetic reader to interject their own feelings into the narrative. There is no room for ambiguity here. Babies used for target practice, being separated from your mother, running toward your death—Wiesel doesn’t have to convince the reader that these things are horrible. The story speaks for itself without heavy description. Although this is a work in translation, it seems unlikely that Wiesel’s wife (the translator) would have taken the initiative to remove his adjectives, so we can be relatively safe in assuming that this element of craft is attributable to Wiesel.

I am thinking about this in relation to my own novel, Polska, 1994. Magda undergoes two major moments of trauma—losing her mother and rape. She also re-lives those moments later. I think it is important that in the initial incident the detail is spare and that the events speak for themselves because these are also not ambiguous experiences. Wiesel also uses the tersest of sentences (several quoted above) and that really gives a sense of the character living in the moment and getting through it in any way he can. I have read many accounts of World War II and the Holocaust and to me this one in its spare-ness seemed among the most emotionally credible. How do you describe the indescribable?  In contrast to Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, Night is less shocking, but more human.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Night from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Enduring Mundanity with William Trevor in After Rain

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After Rain - William TrevorIn After Rain, William Trevor presents many stories that play with the reader’s plot expectations. Often he creates a compelling, even dangerous, scenario, but then the story unfolds to reveal that the reader was watching the magician’s assistant rather than his hands. Whether the crooks are the protagonists or the antagonists, the result is always the same: Trevor pulls the rabbit from the hat as we expected in the first place, presenting the triumph of conventionality.

In “Timothy’s Birthday,” Trevor writes of an old couple anxious for their son, Timothy, to come home and celebrate his birthday with them. The initial scene is warm and homey as Charlotte cooks and Odo prepares a fire. Timothy convinces a friend, Eddie, to go in his place and say he is ill. Charlotte is the picture of a concerned mother: “[Timothy’s] tummy played up a bit once.” Eddie makes himself at home, fixing the toilet and helping himself to gin and trinkets. The reader starts to worry for the old couple. Is Eddie going to hurt them?  How can he show such disrespect for people who have treated him so kindly?  But Eddie leaves and when Odo and Charlotte discover the missing decoration, “[t]heir own way of life was so much debris all around them, but since they were no longer in their prime that hardly mattered….Their love of each other had survived the vicissitudes.” They are beyond caring. They have endured and their life remains fundamentally unchanged.

“A Bit of Business” follows a similar pattern except this time we meet the crooks first as they rob the neighborhood while everyone is out waiting for the Pope. When we learn that Mr. Livingston is at home and elderly, the story seems to be set. Surely these youths will come upon Mr. Livingston and something dire will happen. The tension rises as Trevor cuts between the points of view of the thieves and of Mr. Livingston. “At once Mangan knew there was a bit of trouble.” They tie Mr. Livingston up and leave. So they haven’t hurt him, but still “[h]e’ll squawk his bloody guts out.” and they’ll get what’s coming to them. Surely they’ll go back to finish him off or at least they’ll get caught, but no, they pick up a couple of girls. In fact, it is the crooks who are changed by the encounter with Mr. Livingston: “[t]he lean features of Mr. Livingston were recalled by Mangan….they’d bollocksed the whole thing” and “there was nowhere left to hide from the error that had been made….Privately, each calculated how long it would be before the danger they’d left behind in the house caught up with them.” By having the thieves changed by their interaction with the normative Mr. Livingston, Trevor again creates an aura of the persistence of mundanity.

In “Widows,” Trevor set up a rivalry between sisters Catherine and Alicia with passages such as: “[i]n her girlhood she had been pretty – slender and dark….Alicia, taller, dark also, had been considered the beauty of the town.” But when Thomas Leary appeared and tried to bilk Catherine out of £226, my attention shifted to Thomas as Catherine’s antagonist. His deceit was compelling and I found myself wanting Catherine to stand up to him. Trevor kept Alicia present on the page through simple actions like “replacing forks and spoons in the cutlery container,” which built the expectation that the sisters have banded together in crisis. Alicia does back Catherine up against Thomas in conversation “‘[a]nything could have happened to the receipt….In the circumstances.’” However, when Catherine decided to pay Thomas, Alicia’s hopes were dashed and she turned on her sister: “[h]er expectation had been that in their shared state they would be as once they were….If Leary had not come that day there would have been something else.” The power struggle is once again between Catherine and Alicia. The story is not at all difficult to follow, but the shifting dynamics not only shows the complexity of the relationship between the sisters, it also conveys the sense that something would have come between Catherine and Alicia eventually. Thomas was merely a catalyst, interesting though he was, and the story remains as it ever was the rivalry between the sisters. In comparison to Thomas’s thievery, the sisterly feud seems quotidian and conventional, just where I have come to expect Trevor will leave me at the end of a story.

What was interesting to me about the structure of Trevor’s stories was how clearly they articulated a singular world view without seeming forced. He feeds the reader’s interest with some of the more seedy aspects of life, but his real interest seems to be conveying the fact that ordinary endures. I can learn from the complexity of the relationships he builds between characters such as Catherine and Alicia and Charlotte and Odo. Their encounters with the seamier side of life portray the characters’ normative lives much in the way that Gatsby was drawn through the negative space around him. There were other aspects of Trevor’s work that I can learn from as well, for example, the way he handles the letter in “A Day,” by never giving us the exact text of the letter but giving us enough information to infer it. I may in the long run look at his point of view shifts versus Mary Gaitskill’s.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of After Rain from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Symmetrical Composition in The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera presents the same scenes over and over again throughout the narrative. Like waves lapping up onto the shore, these incidents never completely overlap and the repeated introduction of the same events has the effect of giving the reader a more nuanced view of these events and the characters while reinforcing the importance of the scene. Kundera refers to something he calls “symmetrical composition–the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end” and insists “human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.”

Tereza’s photographs of the girls in miniskirts holding flags in the faces of Russian soldiers during the autumn of 1968 are one example of this symmetrical composition. Each time the pictures recur throughout the story the reader gains a greater understanding of the development of Tereza’s character.

At first, the pictures are a triumph for Tereza: “The days she walked through the streets of Prague taking pictures of Russian soldiers and looking danger in the face were the best of her life.” The next time the photographs are mentioned begins with great promise and it casts Tereza as having been part of a movement to “preserve the face of violence for the distant future.” But the very next section dampens the excitement. A magazine editor proclaims Tereza’s pictures beautiful but no longer au courant. Then a photographer tries to give her encouragement by suggesting she shoot cacti as a vehicle for starting a career in fashion photography. The pictures become a symbol of the world’s fleeting interest in her country. For Tereza the pictures meant freedom and standing up to oppression, but for the world they were merely an illustration.

The pictures take on another meaning when Tereza returns to Prague and finds women yielding the same pride with which they had held the flags to fight for umbrella space on a crowded street. Then, while working in the restaurant, Tereza is confronted by the implications of the photographs she took as images from Time begin to be used by the secret police as evidence against fellow citizens. The pictures which had brought her so much pride have become Tereza’s contribution to the persecution of her fellow citizens. She reflects, “[H]ow naïve they had been, thinking they were risking their lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police.”

The pictures also function as an objective correlative by giving the reader access to Tereza’s triumph. The pictures carry the weight of her triumph and the reader is reminded of her strength of character when she took the pictures, but the pictures have are greater flexibility than a typical objective correlative. As the pictures recur throughout the narrative, Tereza’s feelings about (and the reader’s understanding of) them become more complex. They continue to reappear (which is the symmetrical composition part) but they no longer have the same meaning.

Kundera achieves the same effect with stories of Tomas and Tereza visiting and eventually moving to the spa town and also the encounter Tomas has with his son and the editor Tomas accidentally denounced (this latter example is freshened by recounting the event from two different viewpoints). Each time these incidents are recounted or places visited the story changes enough so that the reader gains new insight into the incident and how the characters retrospectively view it. As in life.

I attempted the same effect in my novel, Polska, 1994. By bringing a scene back up, in my case the arrest, in echoes, I can refresh the reader’s memory and provide further insight into how my characters, particularly Magda, are relating to it. This re-framing speaks volumes about the evolution the characters are undergoing and helps the reader feel as though they are evolving along with the character. It is also pleasing to a reader to encounter the same images more than once in a novel. It helps create the illusion of a finite world which could be explained within the confines of a book, and when well done, it does not feel manipulative. I would argue that the changes evoked when images and events recur in this novel keep the items fresh, as repetition can become quickly stale and make the reader wonder whether there is any sense in continuing with the narrative.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Pynchon’s Crazy Voice in The Crying of Lot 49

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In the The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon weaves together a series of unlikely events using the voice of a compelling narrator to form the story of a postal conspiracy. From the first sentence of the novel as the narrator takes the protagonist Oedipa from Tupperware party to being the executrix of the estate of a real estate mogul, the novel is full of wild and unexpected turns. These turns might be difficult for a reader to navigate if it weren’t for the extraordinary voice of the narrator.

The voice is whimsical and often strays off topic. For example, just after Oedipa hears about her role in the Inverarity will, the narrator muses:

[s]he tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then. Through the rest of the afternoon, through her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-Pines to buy ricotta and listen to Muzak (today she came through the bead-curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble’s variorium recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist); then through the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden” (10).

The reader is given all sorts of extraneous details, but because the details are so interesting and unusual and because the narration always loops back to the topic at hand (in this case, Oedipa thinking about whether anything unusual had happened), I was interested in learning more and was not lost in the narration. I was however carried away by it. The voice of the narrator was like someone telling a story who has so much detail they want to pack in but they are trying to keep in mind the forward thrust of the story. Because the novel becomes a sort of mystery, I wanted to re-read portions of the novel and see if this extraneous information was in fact pertinent or led somewhere. The voice of the narrator was interesting enough to make me think everything he said had meaning and import.

I have read breathless narrators before, the type who are trying to keep up with the pace of the story and the effect is “and then, and then, and then…”, but this narrator was in control of the story and was going to let it unfold at his pace. The effect was intoxicating. Despite the odd character names and the implausibility of the events, I was willing to follow this story through orgiastic sex scenes and nights spent following a bum just to see where on Earth he was going with the story.

It’s an interesting effect to have a narrator who is so in control of what’s happening. Control may be the wrong word, because it doesn’t seem as though he is orchestrating it. Rather it seems as though he alone knows what is going on. This novel would have been a mess with a less omniscient narrator because Oedipa has no idea what is going on. The reader would be immersed in her confusion and would have difficulty following the threads of the mystery. In fact, it is the juxtaposition of this compelling, competent narrator with Oedipa’s confusion that gives the reader the freedom to follow the narrative. It could and does go anywhere, but the coolness of the narrator gives the novel a semblance of order and perhaps even predestination. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the narrator in this novel is God, although narrators can take on a certain deific quality, but the narrator does provide order to the universe of this novel.

I did not use an omniscient narrator in Polska, 1994, but I can see from this novel how important it is for the voice that is doing the storytelling to be compelling. I considered using a cooler retrospective voice for the part of my novel where Magda is leading up to her regrets and then transitioning to in-the-moment narration for the remainder of the book. By starting with the cooler voice, I would like to keep a reader’s confusion to a minimum as she comes to understand the world the way Magda sees it. The retrospective voice would have allowed Magda to draw some conclusions about her life and her experience and to let the reader understand her life through those conclusions. I ended up going with something that was more raw and immediate—something that spoke to her post-rape turmoil.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Crying of Lot 49 from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.