What We Talk About When We Talk About Nothing

Spectacle (Stories) by Susan Steinberg

"Steinberg is one of the best fiction writers in America today." Joshua Furst

 

 

 

I was tempted to begin this journal entry with the famous final proposition from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but since no one has any idea what Wittgenstein meant--I certainly don't--I'll quote instead a proposition I flatter myself that I do understand, 6.522 for those of you who are following along at home: "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical." [Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dis zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische.]  The key word here is Unaussprechliches: my dictionary provides "inexpressible" and also "unutterable" as if these words meant the same thing.  That which cannot be spoken might lie beyond language--the feeling one has for one's children, for example--or it might be the case that we know the proper word for what we are feeling but refuse to utter it because it would be too terrible to do so--I feel this way when a news reporter sticks a microphone in the face of a bereaved husband and asks how he feels now that his (let's imagine) wife has been crushed in a collapsed garment factory.  What he feels is both inexpressible and unutterable.  I don't mean to split hairs here, but the distinction is an important one both for our lives and in our engagement with serious literary works.

 

Raymond Carver was, of course, the most influential of minimalists; indeed, his impact on American literature has been remarkable, if not entirely (in my opinion) positive. It is likely that if you pursue an MFA in fiction writing you will be moved to produce sentences like Ray's sentences, or, as we say, to strive for the Carveresque:

 

"A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.

'How did you lose your hands?' I asked after he'd said what he wanted.

'That's another story," he said. 'You want this picture or not?'" ["Viewfinder"]

 

Not much happens in a classic Carver story; drinks are poured, cigarettes are smoked, conversations tail off into uneasy silences.  When something does happen, as in "Viewfinder," you're hard-pressed to say what exactly and perplexed as to the why. "Gerald Weber didn't have any words left in him. He kept quiet and drove the car." ["The Pheasant"] And so it goes.  But in spite of the silences, there's something going on in Ray's little vignettes of American desperation--there's desperation for one thing, the sense that everything bad that can happen has already happened and we've been invited to witness the aftermath.  When I read Ray I feel like I do when I look at pictures of bombed-out cities. There we are, having a bourbon, sitting in the rubble.

 

Carver's palette is the inexpressible.  But Susan Steinberg goes Ray one better; she  mines the unutterable, not just the things that we are silent about but the things we cannot help but be silent about.  A Carver character is reticent; a Steinberg character is dumb (in the original meaning of the word):

 

"When the plane crashed, I was all messed up.

For years, I was all messed up.

I could see the scene inside the plane.

I could see the scene outside.

And I had thoughts of flying.

Then thoughts of falling. . . . " ["Spectacle"]

 

There are twelve pages of propositions just like these.  There are no characters to speak of, no incidents that we can believe in, no feelings expressed.  All p is q. No p is q. Some p is q.  Reading Spectacle, I thought about my study of symbolic logic, p's and q's that stand for propositions that stand for (as Wittgenstein briefly believed) pictures of the world. I thought of poems that are really prose; I though of prayers chanted in Latin--nonsense, but full of yearning.  Steinberg is doing something in her stories, but what exactly?

 

"Next someone turned up the radio and some song was on, and the six of us were riding up some burned-out Baltimore street. There was no one on the street but us. We were screaming out the words to this song. The another song came on and we knew that song too....I was just so fucking powerful in that moment." ["Superstar"] Well, it isn't Proust, but why should Susan Steinberg write like Proust? 

 

Here is Mr. Joshua Furst on Steinberg's Spectacle:

 

"In each of the stories, we see one or more aspects of how this narrator grapples with the relationship between her circumstances and her ability to control them. And the events presented in the stories reappear with nothing changed but the meaning they hold. The narrator is pressured into pulling the plug on her dying father; her college friend dies in a plane crash. She gets drunk. She has sex with someone she doesn’t like, or someone she does like but pretends not to, or someone she’s pretty sure doesn’t like her."

Fair enough.  But what isn't said here is that we readers don't know if any of these things are really happening--Steinberg purveys ultra-minimalism plus irony!  Is there a plane crash?  Does she kill her father? Has she slept with creeps? The lovely veil of fiction--our willingly suspended disbelief--Steinberg tears it  up with clinical efficiency--she's cataloging events and nothing more; causality is undercut; of course fiction is untrue, but what if it's not only untrue but pointless?

The "narrator"--a droning voice uttering gnomic propositions (see above) isn't only unreliable, she's a phantom, maybe dreaming what she tells the reader, but most certainly not meaning any of it.  Indeed, the word "grapples" in Mr. Furst's review is ludicrous--there is no touching let alone grappling in Spectacle. Steinberg's bursts of prose are feather-light; her detachment is absolute. 

The comparison to Wittgenstein isn't that far-fetched: "Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it--or at least similar thoughts"  In that case....we come to the end, to the futility of writing, of speaking, of feeling. Not the inexpressible or the unutterable, but the banal--not the "things that we pass over in silence" but the things unworthy of expression. What we talk about when there isn't any point in talking.

Untitled, Mark Tobey

 

 

 



Spectacle is published by Graywolf Press https://www.graywolfpress.org/

George Ovitt (5/8/13)

 



 

 



 

 

 

 



Currywurst and War

The Invention of Curried Sausage (Die Entdeckung der Currywurst)

by Uwe Timm

‘Today it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War,” laments Austrian writer W. G. Sebald—certainly no apologist for German atrocities—in a lecture he gave in Zurich called ‘Air War and Literature’, “still harder to think about the horrors involved in that devastation.” Indeed, from the spring of  1942 through the end of the war, the Allied Forces—most notably the English and Americans—carried out a veritable carpet bombing of German cities, destroying military and industrial targets in Hamburg, Cologne, and Wilhelmshaven before the English, under Churchill’s direction, expanded their campaign to include the total destruction of key German cities through the ‘terror bombing’ of their city centers and predominantly civilian populations, a nearly unprecedented tactic (see the German and Italian bombing of Guernica) that included the relentless fire-bombing of Bremen, Darmstadt, Berlin, Dresden, and Hamburg.  By the end of the war, more than two million tons of bombs had fallen on 131 German cities, some 600,00 Germans were dead, and a half a million left homeless. According to Sebald, the destruction was so extensive that “there were 31.1 cubic meters of rubble for every person in Cologne and 42.8 cubic meters for every inhabitant of Dresden.”

It is from out of the ruins of that same Germany that German author Uwe Timm has fashioned his charming and unlikely tale, The Invention of Curried Sausage.  Currywurst, a proletarian snack of sliced pork sausage in a curried tomato sauce,  has been a staple of German fast food since World War II.  As of 2009, it even has its own museum: the Deutsches Currywurst Museum in Berlin, “a sausage shrine dedicated to all things currywurst, including sausage sofas…”* The premise of The Invention of Curried Sausage is simple--and anything but tragic: not convinced that the popular dish was invented in Berlin by the housewife and “rubble woman,” Herta Charlotte Heuwer, on September 4, 1949, when she mixed together catsup, Worcestershire sauce, and some curry powder given her by a British soldier, author/narrator Uwe Timm sets out to track down what he believes are the dish’s true origins in his hometown of Hamburg. There he finds Lena Brücker, a food vendor he knew from childhood, now an old woman living out her final days in a retirement home. Through a series of tea-time visits, Timm patiently endures the old woman’s poignant, if sometimes meandering recollections of the war—some funny, some bittersweet—and finally manages to tease out the details of her miraculous invention.  

Defined by the author as a novella in the original sense of the word, meaning “ a little piece of news,” The Invention of Curried Sausage is more than that.  It is also a story about war and memory, about loneliness and compassion, and about the sometimes magical role of happenstance in life.  

Uwe Timm was born in Hamburg in 1940. He trained to be a furrier and went to college in Braunschweig. He graduated from high school in 1963, and went on to study Philosophy and German Literature in Munich and Paris. He was awarded his doctorate in philosophy in 1971. One of Germany's greatest contemporary writers and novelists, he now works in Munich and Berlin.**  He is perhaps best known in the States for his 1989 novel The Snake Tree. The Invention of Curried Sausage is published by New Directions http://ndbooks.com/ .

* “The Craze Over Currywurst” The Wall Street Journal, August 27^th, 2009

**Bloomsbury Publishing

Peter Adam Nash

"I am a Communist first, a writer after that."

The Committee by Somallah Ibrahim

"Anything that takes us beyond the limits of the conventional novel, now exhausted, is worth doing...."

Writing political fiction tests the limits of a writer's abilities--it is difficult to balance the artfulness of a story with a passionate ideological conviction because the political overshadows the personal in just the way that history mocks our individual hopes and ambitions.  Writers of thrillers make their living by crushing human beings under the weight of events they cannot control--Robert Ludlum's books provide an example--creating stories that focus on their characters' lack of agency and substituting paranoia for any of the deeper emotions that make fiction a source of insight into human lives.  Many political novels allow preaching to overwhelm even the rudimentary conventions of literary art: Atlas Shrugged is the best/worst example (full disclosure: I only managed 250 pages) or Sartre's Les chemins de la liberté trilogy (ditto). Even a gifted writer like Richard Wright can fall into the trap (in Native Son) of allowing the political message to overwhelm his art.  Then there are the well-known dystopias of Huxley, Orwell, or Bulgakov--where the subtleties of fiction are sacrificed to the exploration (and demolition) of a set of political ideas.  And finally there are the many great political novels: The Grapes of Wrath (which I've just been rereading) comes to mind at once, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, Malraux's Man's Fate,  Penn Warren's All the King's Men, and the novels by writers who have endured Western colonialism--Achebe, Mahfouz, Thiong'o--the list is long and distinguished and everyone will have his or her own favorites.  So: it can be done--novels can convey political ideas forcefully--but navigating the space between art and politics is a difficult one that tests a writer's talent and creativity.

Sonallah Ibrahim's That Smell, self-published in Cairo in 1966, represented a turning point in Egyptian fiction.  This semi-autobiographical novel relates the shock and sorrow encountered by a nameless character (certainly the author himself), just released from prison, as he attempts to re- adapt to ordinary life. That Smell is a raw, unflinching account of alienation and despair; Ibrahim himself spent five years in prison for his communist views, and in his prison notebooks* writes, among other things, of his desire to create fiction that will be capable of transforming Egyptian society: "Can I unify the personal and the objective [the political] in my writing?"  To create this unity has been Ibrahim's artistic task, and the difficulties he encountered are on full display in The Committee, published in Arabic in 1981 (as Al-Lajnah) and in English in 2001.

 

Critics have compared The Committee to the writings of Kafka, or called the book "Kafkaesque," but I can't agree with this comparison.  Kafka is funny; Ibrahim is anything but--indeed, the deadly seriousness of this slender novel reflects the author's desire to add what Hemingway thought of as the "fourth dimension" to fiction--the [politically] symbolic.  The Committee of the novel is the unfeeling and irrational representative of the West, of capitalism, of the colonial oppression of Arabs.  Their manipulation of the narrator feels like the sort of manipulation one finds in a Ludlum novel--a sinister and evil force that compels the hero (a 'man without qualities' or without memory) to take some unspecified actions to save himself from a fate that is unclear and, as in any irrational world, undeserved. 

 



But Kafka's heroes aren't political victims; they suffer from the "existential plight of modern man" (sounds like an undergraduate term-paper title!), not from a political system but from life itself.  Kafka isn't an ideological writer; his subject is the human condition, not political oppression, but the oppressiveness of life itself--which is what makes a book like The Castle so witty; there is no redemption possible in Kafka's fiction, and the forces of absurdity are allied against all of us--permanently. What could be funnier than hopelessness?

In Ibrahim's novel, The Committee demands an interview with an unnamed Egyptian. We can infer that he is well-educated, multi-lingual, possibly a political dissident.  He is to be "examined"--in all senses of the term.  The large, impersonal Committee then assigns the examinee an ambiguous task--to research the life of the most "illustrious" figure in the Arab world.  After some speculation and many dead ends the narrator (whose style of speech and thought is, to put it mildly, laconic) decides to research "the Doctor," an Egyptian Proteus who appears as both benefactor and exploiter of his countrymen, a Machiavellian capitalist and benign socialist, a humanitarian and a ruthless oppressor.  In other words, as the West itself--England for most of Egypt's history, but also France and, in recent decades, the U.S. The narrator discovers in snippets of the popular press, including American celebrity magazines, that the Doctor is not only the most important figure in the Middle East, he is also the unique catalyst for the social and political changes roiling the Arab world.  Everything, in the narrator's view, is connected, and as a Marxist Ibrahim makes a case for the truth of this claim in long speeches to the Committee.  However, the Doctor was not the answer to the Committee's riddle, not, apparently, the luminary and center of political gravity the narrator believed him to be, and, driven to desperation, the narrator commits murder and is condemned to the worst punishment meted out by the Committee--a punishment that makes Kafka's Harrow look like a stroll along the Nile. 

What to make of this odd little book?  I was engrossed by the first fifty pages, then puzzled by the long discourse on Coca-Cola--not by the politics of the narrator's monologues, with which I am in agreement, but on the way in which Ibrahim hoped they would serve the story.  The denouement of The Committee appears implausible--too self-destructive to be believable, but then we know so little about the narrator that motivation isn't a consideration.  The last fifty pages have the quality of a sermon or a political speech and appear to throw over the conventions of story-telling altogether.  Perhaps it is wrong to believe that art can transcend politics--this was not, after all, the view of Marx--but, nonetheless, I believe it.  Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, in particular its third volume, Sugar Street, also makes the case for a leftist interpretation of Egyptian history, but in a far more subtle and persuasive way.

Sunallah Ibrahim was born in Cairo in 1937 and studied Law at Cairo University. He joined the Marxist Democratic Movement for National Liberation while there; during Nasser's crackdown on leftists in the 1950's Ibrahim was arrested and spent the years from 1959-1964 in prison. 

Syracuse University Press has an outstanding list of Middle Eastern fiction, plays and poetry. 
http://www.syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu/books-in-print-series/middle-east-literature.html
The Committee was translated by Mary St. Germain and Charlene Constable with an afterword by Roger Allen.
*http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/sonallah-ibrahim-notes-from-prison/ for a selection of Ibrahim's notes from prison.

George Ovitt (5/5/13)

Argentina: The Dirty War

Departing at Dawn

(Viene clareando) by Gloria Lisé

Posterity forgets or acclaims.

              Walter Benjamin

Even the dedication page of Gloria Lisé’s 2005 novel about Argentina’s “Dirty War” is revealing:

 The story that follows is entirely fiction.

In memory of Isauro Arancibia, his brother,

Antilo Santillán, and Trinidad Iramain, whom I was never

able to meet, because they were killed without ever

being charged or having the right to a defense.

It is a juxtaposition that speaks volumes about Argentina, its politics and history, about the relationship between fact and fiction, and about the challenge to novelists like Lisé to make the world real to us—again and again and again.

The 19^th Century Argentinian author and exile, Domingo F. Sarmiento, best known for his protracted intellectual struggle against tyranny in Argentina, against dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, believed that his greatest enemy was not De Rosas and his kind, but silence and complicity. It was his determination as a writer “to stir emotions, to persuade, to verbalize the collective hatred and instigate a rebellion based not on bullets but on ideas.”* Such it is clear—were I to add “to remember” and “to heal”—was Gloria Lisé’s aim in her smart and affecting novel Departing At Dawn, the story of a politically indifferent medical student named Berta Cristina del Pino who, following the state-sponsored murder of her lover, is drawn headlong into the maelstrom of “La Guerra Sucia” or “The Dirty War”.

In 1976, when this novel begins, the government of President Isabel Peron has just been toppled by the right-wing military junta of Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, a coup that ushered in “el Proceso” or “the Process of National Reorganization,” a seven-year reign of terror unmatched—even by Argentinian standards—in its brutality and repression.  Declassified documents cite an official estimate of 22,000 people killed or “disappeared” between 1975 and 1978.** Early in the novel Berta herself is forced to flee to the countryside, out of fear for her life, where she renews her acquaintance with her mother’s estranged family—with her frog-like aunt, Avelina, and her uncle, Tristán Nepomuceno, “el negro,” who spends his time collecting old nuts and bolts and serenading his favorite snails.

Departing At Dawn, what Luisa Valenzuela calls “a beautifully simple, poetic story of solidarity and love,” is in essence a story about a young woman’s search for identity and connection in a country traumatized by despotism and violence.  As translator Alice Weldon puts it in her helpful Afterword, “For Argentines Viene clareando creates connections between past and present, between public and private, and the way in which even the most apolitical citizen has been forced to confront the exigencies of political life.”

Gloria Lisé (March 22, 1961- ) is an Argentine writer, lawyer, professor, and an accomplished musician. She was fifteen years old in 1976 when a coup d'état overthrew the government of Isabel Martinez de Perón. She is the author of Con los Pies en el Escenario: Trayectoria del Grupo Arte Dramático y su Director Salo Lisé (2003), a book based on the life of her father, and Viene Clareando (2005), which was chosen by Argentina’s National Commission for the Protection of Public Libraries for distribution to the country’s public libraries. (The Feminist Press, Wikipedia)

Departing at Dawn is published in English by The Feminist Press, New York.  Be sure to check out their remarkable list. http://www.feministpress.org/

*I am grateful to Ilan Stavans for his introduction to Sarmiento’s extraordinary Facundo or, Civilization and Barbarism (Penguin Classics).  Part history, sociology, political commentary, and fiction, it is  a book I highly recommend.

** Political Injustice: Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, Anthony W. Pereira, p. 134, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Peter Adam Nash

"Pushed Into a Kind of Nightmare"

The Black Envelope by Norman Manea

“I never wished to be a ‘political’ writer, and I hope I wasn’t only that, even when I was forced to write about a nightmarish politicized reality.”

The opacity of parts of The Black Envelope may be attributable to the reality about which Norman Manea writes--the reality, or rather the unreality, of the Ceausescu years, the farcical (one is tempted to say 'Kafkaesque,' but the dictatorships installed in Eastern Europe after World War II lacked the wit of Kafka's fictional world) injustices, petty indignities, and unremitting terror of an arbitrary political system.  I remember the stories that were circulating in the early 1990's, right after  Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad, stories about Ceausescu's mad version of "democratic socialism," his discredited claims that, unlike his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a die-hard Stalinist, he, Ceausescu, had brought justice, peace, and democracy to Romania. The reality was that Ceausescu's secret police maintained rigid controls over political and artistic speech and tolerated no dissent or opposition. Opponents of the regime were arrested, tortured, and executed in a manner that had become commonplace in Eastern Europe, especially beginning with the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.

Manea has been mentioned as a potential Nobel Prize winner; his books are, if not overtly political, a reflection of a life engaged, or perhaps victimized, by the tragedies of his country.  As a Romanian Jew, Manea was deported, along with most other Romanian Jews, to a concentration camp at Transnistria, in the Ukraine, when he five years old.  After his repatriation in 1945, Manea attended school and university, trained as a hydro-engineer, and began  to write fiction in the early 70's.  All of  his books were banned and he was forced into exile in 1986. 

 

Manea describes his own youthful deportation as being "pushed into a kind of nightmare," into a terrible Russian winter during which his grandparents and many of his family's friends and neighbors died and his father was reduced to believing that life was no longer worth living.  In his autobiographical statements and his memoir-novel The Hooligan's Return, Manea attributes to his 'iron-willed' mother his own and his father's survival. 

 In The Black Envelope, Tolea, a high school teacher, who has apparently lost his job for an ill-defined sexual transgression, seeks to unravel the story of his father's mysterious death, but not with much diligence.  In fact, the novel is a patchwork of enigmatic and truncated scenes--a loosely constructed amalgam of fragmented action and broken bits of internal monologue--including an account of Tolea's ill-fated job as a hotel clerk, his encounters with characters from across the social spectrum of 1980's Bucharest, and  his mockery of a corrupt society which he seeks to escape through ironic critique and dreamy disengagement.  The novel is populated with black marketers, sycophants, political operatives, fools and fiends--in other words, part of The Black Envelope's  purpose is to offer a  'General Prologue' to the sordid tales of Communist Romania's dupes and crooks. It struck me halfway through the novel that Tolea's musings, which are often disjointed and difficult to follow, have the feeling of an interrogation--they circle implicit questions and offer only evasive answers.  It is as if the book were written to fool the censors--as it was.

It also struck me that one could write such a book today, about this country, my beloved America--increasingly a sham "peoples' republic" dominated by dupes and crooks, lobbyists and PACS, with a government controlled by a corrupt ruling class, with its ideals perverted by greed and with propaganda having replaced reasoned civil discourse.  Of course, I'm exaggerating, but The Black Envelope felt especially poignant as its sordid tales of moral corruption unfolded against the background of Congressional 'debates' about the budget, gun control, and sequestration--a  newspeak term if ever there were one.  It is unfair to Manea's history of suffering and persecution to make this comparison, but one cannot help but do so; this is the power of incisive political fiction--it evokes sympathetic comparisons to one's own situation.

I spent two months slowly making my way through The Black Envelope--it is, to say the least, a challenging book, not one that I could say I "liked" in the way I often like a book--it is full of malaise and bitterness, a rather hopeless vision of a lost era in a benighted country.  But Manea is a great writer, a passionate intellectual witness to his own and his country's tragedy, and perhaps to ours as well.

 

The Black Envelope is translated by Patrick Camiller and published by Yale University Press in their Margellos World Republic of Letters series.

There is a fine interview with Manea, produced by Bard College, available here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsU2RUDUiyE

George Ovitt (4/28/13)

The Art of Nostalgia: Di Lampedusa and Tanizaki

The Leopard (Il Gatttopardo)by Guiseppe di Lampedusa and The Makioka Sisters (細雪 Sasameyuki)by Junichiro Tanizaki

Oh call back yesterday…bid time return.

 

                                                                 William Shakespeare, Richard II, 3.2

It has been said that nostalgia is memory with the pain removed. If that is true, it is only true in part, for real nostalgia is nothing if not painful, involving as it does the haunting, sometimes exquisite disjunction between the world one knows and the world beating daily at one’s door. In fact nostalgia—a catch-all term coined by medical student Johannes Hofer in 1668 to describe the anxiety disorders displayed by Swiss mercenaries far from home—is a Greek compound comprised of νόστος, meaning ‘return home’ and ἄλγος, meaning ‘pain’. While it is clear that nostalgia can be abused, manipulated for profit or nurtured jealously as a hedge against change, what seems less clear, what is perhaps more difficult to grasp, is that we—as people, cultures, religions, and nations—would be helpless without it.

At its best, and for all its obvious conceit, nostalgia is one of the essential means by which we, as individuals, reckon with our own mortality—with the weakening of our eyes and limbs, with the growth of our children, with the fading of hope and love. It is how we shore up and safeguard our position in a world now promiscuous with change, a sort of homing instinct for the heart and mind, so that in the end nostalgia is less about persuading others that life was better in the past (even if it was)—that children had manners, that everyone pulled his own weight—than about consoling oneself in times of struggle and pain. For nostalgia, like death itself, is an expressly lonely, deeply personal thing, best savored in private or in the dusty, shuttered worlds of novels, poems, and plays. I myself have always had a weakness for works of loss and remembrance; deeply sentimental, I have always had “eyes in the back of my head.” 

 “This is one of the great lonely books,” wrote E.M. Forster in an early review of Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard. I think I know what he meant, for I have returned to this novel again and again over the past twenty years, often when I’m feeling out of sorts with the world, its particular sadness as fine, as affecting as any sadness I know.

First published by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore in 1958, one year after the author’s death in Rome from lung cancer, the novel centers upon Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, one of the last scions of a decadent Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the forces of democracy and revolution known as the Risorgimento (Italian: “Rising Again”). Beginning in the year 1860, as Garibaldi and his Red Shirts (known as the “Piedmontese” or, more derisively, the “Garibaldeschi”), are laying siege to Palermo, the story of Prince Fabrizio—an elegy at heart—describes, in elegant, sometimes sumptuous detail, the passing of a corrupt, if exquisitely cultured man and his age.

With the unification of Italy in 1861, under King Victor Emmanuel II, the eight autonomous states by which the peninsula was then divided (including the Bourbon states of Naples and Sicily called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) were united as one, much to the outrage and consternation of the Pope and his conservative allies. Often lauded as a triumph of liberalism, as propagated by the writings of philosopher Benedetto Croce, the Risorgimento is understood by others today—the unification of Italy notwithstanding—as an aristocratic and bourgeois revolution that failed.  

Even to Don Fabrizio, whose own future and that of the illustrious House of Salinas is gravely imperiled by the democratic militancy of Garibaldi and Mazzini, it is plain that, for all of the revolution’s smoke and fire, for all its egalitarian rhetoric, nothing for the peasants of Sicily will change. “Much would happen,” he reflects, near the start of the novel, in thinking about his beloved if wayward nephew, Tancredi, and about the rebels gathering force in the hills around Palermo, “but all would be playacting; a noisy, romantic play with a few spots of blood on the comic costumes…”  Indeed, while predictably reactionary in his politics and values, the Prince is as deeply scored by the fatalism of that parched and subject land as any goatherd, nursemaid, or priest. “Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jovelike frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it.”

It is partly this, the Prince’s quiet resignation to the change then sweeping over the peninsula—his fine and melancholy wisdom, his love of the cosmos, his long and philosophical view of life—that makes him such an appealing character. Effete, surely, the occasional tyrant and womanizer, no doubt, he, like a priest, like a poet, redeems himself as a man and character by the gentle grandeur of his vision, his eyes (with the aid of his precious telescopes) searching the heavens for solace each night, patiently charting the movements of the stars.

“Anyone with a taste for traditional architecture must agree that the Japanese toilet is perfect,” writes novelist Junichiro Tanizaki in his lovely, sometimes surprising 1933 meditation on traditional Japanese arts and architecture, In Praise of Shadows. On the matter of toilets he waxes poetic: “…the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss… there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss and the stepping stones… the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping  of insects or the songs of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of the seasons.” This, to anyone familiar with the author, is classic Tanizaki, embracing as it does a somber affection for traditions past, an aesthetic—according to translator, Thomas J. Harper—not of a celebrant but a mourner. For Tanizaki, much of what he describes in this short book, and in his many novels that followed, “had either perished or was preserved, fossil-like, in surroundings that betrayed its true beauty.”

The Makioka Sisters, Tanizaki’s longest novel, begun in serial form in 1943 and not completed until 1948, tells the poignant, exquisitely detailed story of the aristocratic Makioka sisters and their struggle to preserve their dignity and traditions in the face of rampant modernization and war.

Set in the mercantile city of Osaka in the years just prior to World War II, a period of intense militarism and international aggression under Shōwa emperor, Hirohito, the novel traces, with nearly seismographic precision, the quakes and tremors of this new Japan. It is a cultural transformation writ small within the once-great Makioka family itself, with the eldest sisters, Tsuruko and Sachiko, representing the subtle forms and aesthetic of old Japan and the youngest, Taeko, with her doll-making business, her boyfriends, and her smart Western clothes, the foreign and flagrant and new. Focused primarily upon securing a suitable marriage for the third sister, the humble Yukiko, this fine and patient novel retails the daily lives of these four women and the painful compromises they are forced to make. Originally entitled Sasameyuki, meaning “lightly falling snow,” it is a story of great beauty that explores the timeless Japanese obsession with the transience and fragility of life.

As is the case with most great fiction, the illusion of eavesdropping on the action of these kindred novels is, for readers, the key to their success, indeed instrumental to the triumph of these wistful, nostalgic tales. For in both cases, and for all of their more public scenes, what we as readers are ultimately made witness to is the private grief of the authors themselves, through the characters, the proxies, they’ve made. 

Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was born 23rd December 1896 in Palermo, from an aristocratic family (of the Princes of Lampedusa, Dukes of Palma and Montechiaro). At the end of 1954, he began writing  Il Garropardo; in June of the following year, he interrupted the novel in order to concentrate on another work Places of my Infancy: A Memory, only to take the novel up again in November. Later, he was to work on other books (Joy and Law, The Siren, the first chapter of his new novel The Blind Kittens): but in April 1957 he was diagnosed as having a tumour on his right lung, a condition that led to his death on 23 July of the same year (his body was buried 28th July in the family burial ground in the Capuchin brothers' cemetery). Rejected for publication by Mondadori, The Leopard was finally published in 1958 by Feltrinelli, thanks to the active interest and determination of Giorgio Bassani. Instantly a huge success, the book won the Strega Prize in 1959. (Italica)

Junichiro Tanizaki was born in Tokyo in 1886 and lived there until the earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the Kyoto-Osaka region, the scene of his novel The Makioka Sisters (1943-48). Among his works are Naomi (1924), Some Prefer Nettles (1928), Quicksand (1930), Arrowroot (1931), A Portrait of Shunkin (1933), The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (1935), modern versions of The Tale of Genji (1941, 1954, and 1965), Captain Shigemoto's Mother (1949), The Key (1956), and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961). By 1930 he had gained such renown that an edition of his complete works was published, and he was awarded Japan's Imperial Prize in Literature in 1949. Tanizaki died in 1965. (Random House)

Peter Adam Nash