De Profundis: Brazil

Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amidst a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad ligthclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.” It is from this passage from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that the late Brazilian-Jewish writer Clarice Lispector takes her epigraph for her astonishing first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. Indeed her debt to Joyce is clear. Published in Rio in 1943, the novel is nothing if not a tribute to the language he unleashed. 

Still, it is more the spirit of Virginia Woolf who haunts these lonely pages. It is really from Woolf, from her particularly feminine oppression and longing, that this novel takes its heartbeat and blood. Jumping back and forth in time, the story concerns itself with the startling interior landscape of a frustrated, deeply introspective, almost monstrously imaginative child and young woman known only as Joana. In this age of Facebook and Tumblr, one might be tempted to mistake the story for just another drunken foray into the temple of Self, but one would be wrong. As with most great modernist fiction, the fons et origo of this novel is Character with a capital C, a single individual whose perspective, whose psychology, not only subsumes and comprises the story’s plot and setting (for what little they mean), but actually proves macroscopic in its obsessive focus on the self, on the intricate clockwork of mind and heart and soul, so that what one gets in the end is not just a story of a woman but a story of the world.

Charged, poetic, at points as angular, dissonant, and unpredictable as Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” such fiction is at first quite demanding to read. Those not experienced with poetry will feel the weight of her words, the almost reckless invention of her prose. Given some patience, some faith, they are sure to be moved. Yet perhaps the most rewarding part such modernist fiction as Near to the Wild Heart is that one’s very notion of reading is changed. One sees freshly, with bold, new eyes. Freed from the tyranny of plot, such fiction delights in subtlety, in complexity, in the riddle of human things. Nothing is clear-cut, nothing certain; one stands astonished, mouth and mind agape. As Adorno puts it, in speaking of art in general:

Artworks that unfold to contemplation and thought without any remainder are not artworks…every artwork is a picture puzzle, a puzzle to be solved, but this puzzle is constituted in such a fashion that it remains a vexation, the preestablished routing of its observer.”*

This summer set yourself a challenge and read this book (or any others by Lispector or Woolf).  You’ll be happy you did.

Clarice (formerly Chaya) Lispector (1920-1977) was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer who was  born in Chechelnyk, Podolio, Ukraine on the ninth of December 1920. She was the youngest daughter of a Jewish family. They were targeted during pogroms that happened during the political turmoil of the early twentieth century. Following the destruction of Ukraine in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania. Still, harried, still anxious, they left Romania, sailing to Brazil in 1922, where they settle first to Maceió, Alagoas, and then in Pernambuco.  There she was educated at the Colégio Hebreo-Idisch-Brasileiro and Ginásio Pernambucano where she encountered Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, a novel that convinced her that she was meant to write.  Journalist, activist, author of numerous prize-winning novels and short story collections (most of which have been translated into English), she published her last novel, A Hora da estrela or The Hour of the Star, in 1977, the year she succumbed to ovarian cancer.+

* from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, London: Continuum, 2002), p.158.

+ Thanks to The European Graduate School for this excellent short biography. 

Peter Adam Nash

Poland, 1945

Jerzy Andrzejewski, Ashes and Diamonds (1948)

As a historian, there are particular moments in European history that I especially want to understand; among them, preeminent even, is the passage of Eastern Europe from Nazi Occupation to Soviet-dominated governments.  What events precipitated the defeat of nationalist aspirations in Poland (for example) during the critical years between the end of the war and the establishment of the Polish United Workers' Party under Boleslaw Bierut? The facts aren't difficult to come by; what is wanted is the feeling of these years, impressions of the primary participants in the nation's reluctant embrace of Stalinism, a sense of the human cost to a nation already dismantled by the Nazi Occupation, Hans Franks' systematic terror, and the extermination of Polish Jews.  As usual, one must turn to works of literary art to gain insights, however limited, into the tragedy of post-war Poland. 

Often the 'whys' of history are neglected in the standard textbooks. We might say, for example, that given the horrors of Nazism, the Soviet Union was a natural ally for Polish nationalists who survived the camps (non-Jewish Poles were sent to Arbeitslager or German slave labor camps like Gross-Rosen, which figures prominently in Ashes and Diamonds) and were liberated by the Red Army.  But one suspects that this explanation is too simple; the truth, it would appear from Andrzejewski's brilliant and compelling novel, is that men and women were drawn into the sphere of Soviet influence, seduced by promises of brotherhood and Polish solidarity, for all sorts of reasons--out of patriotism, despair, personal ambition, greed, and idealism.  Andrzejewski's remarkably well-drawn characters embrace or reject communism only in part because of their experiences in the war; a great strength of this novel is that it depicts the power of an individual's will even at the most "world historical" of moments.



Barracks at Gross-Rosen



At the beginning of Ashes and Diamonds, the war has just ended--or has it? One of Andrzejewski's narrative talents is the blurring of time.  The novel transpires over some undefined period of days or weeks, and the events of the war, once so visceral to its survivors, are now receding from the memories of some characters (by choice) and defining the actions of others, especially those who hope to create a communist nation--a brotherhood of equals--in Poland. In other words, history isn't experienced in the same way by every person, and this is not only true, but a brilliant novelistic observation that enriches and deepens Andrzejewski's great book.

The deftness with which Andrzejewski sketches his characters is remarkable.  During a briefing that will lead to the murder of a member of the Communist Party by a Polish nationalist, the Colonel, who has ordered the assassination, calms a young man's qualms by saying:

"We're living and fighting under very difficult and complex circumstances. But the war years, which were the testing years for everyone, have taught us that things have to be regarded in their elementary, basic set up. There's no time for subtle discrimination. If there had to be any discrimination, it must be simple and clear. Good is good, and evil evil. You agree?"

But of course nothing is ever so clear.  For the socialist Podgorski, the world isn't divided into Manichean absolutes but gray with ethical questions and humane concerns; for the ambitious Mayor Swiecki the tragedy of Poland has served only to feed his ego--a mediocre man in peacetime, Swiecki remakes himself into the perfect Party toady, a yes-man for the cynical and brutal.  For Kossecki, at one time a prisoner at Gross-Rosen, the aftermath of the war is fraught with fear and self-loathing for what he allowed himself to become in the camp.  Opportunists like Drewnowski and Pieniazek (yes the names will give you fits!) have no allegiance to party or nation, while others, like the richly- drawn Communist Szczuka, have complex feelings about the meaning of commitment in the face of Poland's apocalypse (six million Poles, including over 90% of Polish Jews, perished in the war, out of a pre-war population of 35 million). 

Among Andrzejewski's many narrative talents is the subtlety with which he moves his story forward.  Much of the action of the book takes place in the Monopole, the central hotel and restaurant in the town of Ostrowiec, an establishment previously owned, we are offhandedly informed, "by Lewkowicz...one of the wealthiest men in Ostrowiec, [who] died with the rest of his family at Treblinka." Slomka, the new manager of the Hotel Monopole, has been the beneficiary of Nazi racial policies, but no further mention of this fact is made. In 1945 there is emerging a new order, a world that is a blank slate for the ambitions, idealism, and cruelty of every man and woman. When the new world (of communism or of Polish nationalism? That remains to be seen, at least in the novel) has been created, will it be "only ashes and confusion" or "a star-like diamond./The dawning of eternal victory?"  [from the epigram by Cyrpian Norwid].  We know the answer of course--Poland's story since the war has been far more a tale of ashes than of diamonds.  And Andrzejewski as well seems to have been fully aware of the historical situation of his country:

"The fact is I don't know what this new Poland is, just yet."
"How can I put it in a few words? It's difficult, that's probably the best way to describe the tangle of conflicts and contrasts which we're faced with at every step and which we certainly shan't resolve tomorrow or the day after. ...the war is over, but the fight here is only beginning." 

Ashes and Diamonds was the third film in Andrzej Wajda's great trilogy which included A Generation (1954) and the unforgettable Kanal (1956) [Ashes and Diamonds appeared in 1958].  I saw the entire trilogy over one long, rather depressing weekend while in college.  Andrzejewski wrote the screenplay for Ashes and Diamond; the films are available through Janus and provide an emotional immersion in both wartime and post-war Polish history.

Ashes and Diamonds, the novel, is brought to us by the wonderful folks at Northwestern University Press whose series of European Classics includes novels by Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Vladimir Voinovich, and the incomparable Heinrich Boll, who has written the introduction of Andrzejewski's novel. 

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/Home/AllTitles/tabid/86/Default.aspx


George Ovitt (4/16/13)

Haitian Alphabet: One Soul’s Rising

Tired of zombie stories, movies, television series, and video games? If so, try Haitian Jean-Euphèle Milcé’s searing short novel Alphabet of the Night. It may be the antidote you need. Set in the smoke-blackened capital city of Port-au-Prince during the dying days of the Duvalier dictatorship, in the very land where the zombie (zonbi in Haitian Creole) was born, this story—for all its zombies and voodoo, for all its bloodshed and violence—offers little titillation for those weaned on Hollywood, Max Brooks, and AMC. What it offers instead is a portrait of a gravely wounded man and nation haunted by corpses, the missing, and the walking, still-talking dead. 

After the daylight murder of his lover, Lucien, Jewish shopkeeper Jeremy Assaël decides to leave his cursed and lawless homeland for good, but not before discovering the fate of his childhood friend and one-time lover, a mulatto named Fresnel, who has mysteriously disappeared. By the time the novel opens, the Duvalier family has ruled the country for nearly thirty years through a strategy of corruption and terror: an estimated 30,00o Haitians have been murdered by ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s security forces alone, thousands ‘disappeared’, and tens of thousands more exploited, terrorized, and finally forced to flee the country with nothing—quite literally—but the clothes on their backs.

Jeremy Assaël’s quest to learn the fate of his missing friend and lover takes him on a journey through the hell of contemporary Haiti in the course of which he encounters a broad sampling of the Devil’s disciples—government henchmen, foreign aid workers, Catholic priests and Brothers, Protestant missionaries, Rotarians, and even a German Consul General.  Commencing his journey on All Souls’ Day, an important Catholic holiday of alms-giving and prayers for the dead trapped in purgatory (Dante, by contrast, begins his journey through Hell on the day before Good Friday), the narrator has first to make his way through the raucous celebrations, celebrations which, while ostensibly Catholic, are in practice something much much more. Indeed in Haiti, All Souls’ Day has a special resonance for the descendants of African slaves, mixed with voodoo, as it is, and informed by the deep-seeded fear that one’s deceased loved ones have becomes zombies, dead people who cannot get across to lan guinée (literally Guinea, or West Africa), the leafy-green paradise of their ancestors. Only through the intervention of a voodoo priest and the execution of an elaborate series of rituals can the dead be so freed.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator himself meets a hougan, a voodoo priest, who helps him to complete his quest. For, like his black compatriots, Jeremy Assaël yearns to discover—if only in a secular sense—if his lover, Fresnel, has become a zonbi or crossed safely to lan guinée.

Jean-Euphèle Milcé, born in 1969 in Haiti, readily identifies himself as an ex-islander. Having qualified in Applied Linguistics at the State University of Haiti, he trained in information and library management. Jean-Euphele Milce taught Creole Literature and was in charge of the main National Library of Haiti. In 2000 he settled in Neyruz, Switzerland with his wife and children. Alphabet of the Night is published by Pushkin Press. http://www.pushkinpress.com/

Related recommendations:

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, C.L.R. James

Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, Amy Wilentz

Travesty in Haiti: A True Account of Christian Missions, Orphanages, Fraud, Food Aid and Drug Trafficking, Timothy T. Schwartz, Ph.D.

All Souls’ Rising, Madison Smartt Bell

Peter Adam Nash

Zeruya Shalev

Husband and Wife

When finally I put down this novel I was trembling. Described in The Scotsman as an “emotional white-knuckle ride,” this story plunges the reader deep into the heart of a rapidly disintegrating marriage in present-day Jerusalem. In prose so accomplished, so stirring, at times so achingly beautiful that one is tempted to drop one’s guard, to sit back, relax, and surrender oneself to its rhythms, Shalev is relentless in her determination to draw the reader inside the very skin of her protagonist, a mother and social worker named Na’ama Newman, as she registers the bruising daily trauma—each banal and horrific detail—of her imploding love life and family.   

The simple plot is set in motion one morning when Na’ama’s husband, Udi, a healthy, active man, wakes up at home after a solitary outing in the desert to discover that he cannot move his legs.  Unable to find a physical, medical explanation for his paralysis, they are forced to recognize that the problem lies elsewhere, in their marriage itself, their once-happy life together attacked from within by an aggressive emotional cancer.  From there, their relationship quickly spirals out of control, fueled—as fire by gasoline—by years of pent-up disappointment, longing, recrimination, and fear. Told from Na’ama’s acute, often startling perspective, Husband and Wife is the story of one woman’s desperate, exasperating, sometimes valiant attempt to save her marriage and family, to check the momentum of what at points seems as terrible, as implacable as fate.  While the novel might just as well have been set in Shanghai, Durban, or Madrid, so little do we see of modern Israel, so broadly human is the story’s appeal, one cannot help but suspect that this tangled and septic relationship is somehow reflective of the anguish and violence of Jerusalem itself.

Grim, depressing as this sounds—and is (Why would anyone but a masochist read such stuff? Or recommend it?), the novel is also singularly exhilarating in its pacing and candor, in its fearless—thereby hopeful—depiction of relationships and love.  “Husband and Wife is not a book for the faint-hearted,” writes critic Jamie Jauncey, “but for anyone prepared…to experience with almost hallucinatory vividness the complex and conflicting emotions of a modern woman dealing with a disintegrating relationship, there can be no finer opportunity.”  If, like Kafka, you believe that a book should be an axe for the frozen sea inside us, then pick up a copy of this one.  It will shake you to your core.

Zerya Shalev was born at Kibbutz Kinneret. She has an MA in Biblical studies and works as a literary editor at Keter Publishing House. Shalev has published five novels, a book of poetry and a children`s book. Her novels Love Life, Husband and Wife, and Late Family (Terra) have received critical acclaim both in Israel and abroad and have been bestsellers in several countries. Love Life has been included in Der Spiegel`s prestigious list of "20 Best Novels in World Literature" over the last 40 years, together with the work of Saul Bellow, J. M. Coetzee and Philip Roth. Husband and Wife is included in the French Fnac list of the "200 Best Books of the Decade." Shalev has been awarded the Book Publishers Association’s Gold and Platinum Prizes, the Corine Prize (Germany, 2001), the Amphi Award (France, 2003), the ACUM Prize three times (1997, 2003, 2005), and the French Wizo Prize (2007).  Husband and Wife was also nominated for the Femina Prize (France, 2002). A feature film of Love Life, produced in Germany, was released in 2008. Her books have been published abroad in 25 languages.  Husband and Wife (‏בעל ואישה‎) was translated by Dalya Bilu and is published by Grove Press, New York.

Peter Adam Nash