What with bookstores becoming rarer than hen’s teeth and the average American seemingly unable to read anything more daunting than the label of a beer can, I am becoming ever more determined to support books and reading. Therefore, I shall be spending the weekend looking at books, buying books, and attending talks by authors as well as poetry readings, My next post will be on Monday, April 22.
The Los Angeles TimesFestival of Books has become a huge event that brings together readers of all stripes. I even forego my usual sneering at readers of bodice-ripper romances: They, too, are readers—like me in one way, unlike in all others.
When I am not scanning book titles, I go for rest to the Poetry Pavilion, where there is a new poet every twenty minutes during the day. The pavilion never fills up like some of the other stages with big name celebrities, but it is (1) more comfortable and (2) more rewarding. Although I don’t read as much poetry as I should, it is always interesting to hear poets reading their own work.
Next week, I will write posts about those poets that interested me the most.
The Rue de l’Aude in the XV Arrondissement of Paris
I am fatally in love with the novels of Patrick Modiano. This evening, I re-read his The Black Notebook, published in France in 2012 as L’Herbe des nuits. His fatally lost characters end up wandering the streets of Paris, trying to recover lost memories. Meanwhile, I try following their path using an old copy of Paris Pratique par Arrondissement.
The following is from page 75 of my Houghton-Mifflin edition:
And I was afraid I would be waiting for her in vain that night. Then again, I often waited without knowing if she’d show. Or else she would come by when I wasn’t expecting her, at around four in the morning. I would have fallen into a light sleep, and the sound of the key turning in the lock would startle me awake. Evenings were long when I stayed in my neighborhood to wait for her, but it seemed only natural. I felt sorry for people who had to record appointments in their diary, sometimes months in advance. Everything was prearranged for them, and they would never wait for anyone. They would never know how time throbs, dilates, then falls slack again; how it gradually gives you that feeling of vacation and infinity that others seek in drugs, but that I found just in waiting. Deep down, I felt sure you would come sooner or later.
For their reading, Americans tend not to look beyond English-speaking North America and the countries of Western Europe. As a Hungarian, I have always delighted in the literature of Eastern Europe. In this post, I will give you a list of some of my favorite recent fiction from the former Soviet satellites, including one Ukrainian author, because Vladimir Putin is trying to turn his country into a Russian satellite.
I do not include any Russian authors—not because of any prejudice against—but because the field is so rich it deserves a separate post. Here’s the list in alphabetical order by author:
Ivo Andrić (Bosnian 1892-1975)
Won the Nobel Prize in 1961 for his novel The Bridge on the Drina about the Bosnian city of Viśegrad under the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians who succeeded them.
Ádám Bodor (Transylvanian Hungarian b. 1936)
His The Sinistra Zone (1992) is a delightfully funny story of one man’s quest to find his adopted son in a Romanian bear sanctuary and military zone near the Ukrainian border and spirit him return home with him.
Mircea Cărtărescu (Romanian b. 1956)
I am on the point of finishing his novel Solenoid (2015), which is a wonderful work strongly influenced by Kafka, Borges, and Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. He has been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize and is likely to win it soon.
Bohumil Hrabal (Czech 1914-1997)
I have read several great novels from this Czech writer, including Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (1964), I Served the King of England (1973), and Too Loud a Solitude (1977). His gentle humor is catching.
Franz Kafka (Czech Jew 1883-1924)
Although he wrote in German and died a hundred years ago, his work is a major influence on many of the Eastern European authors. My favorites: The Trial (1925) and his short stories.
Gyula Krúdy (Hungarian 1878-1933)
I have read most of his work that has been translated into English, but my favorites were The Crimson Coach (1913) and his journalism collected in Krúdy’s Chronicles (published in 2000).
Andrey Kurkov (Ukrainian b. 1961)
He wrote most of his works in Russian (a larger audience and more $$$), but after Putin has vowed to switch to the Ukrainian dialect. My favorites: Death and the Penguin (1996) and Grey Bees (2018).
Stanislaw Lem (Polish 1921-2006)
Yes, I know he is a sci-fi writer, but his work, especially Solaris (1961) and The Futurological Congress (1971) are of high literary quality.
Olga Tokarczuk (Polish b. 1962)
Won the 2018 Nobel Prize. So far, I’ve read only one of her novels, namely, House of Day, House of Night (1998), which is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.
The year was 1958. I began attending a new Roman Catholic high school which had opened the previous year. At the time, there were only a sophomore and freshman class. I was in the latter.
My most memorable teacher was the Rev. Gerard Hageman for English. He was super strict. Some years earlier, he has put together his own summary of grammatical rules which he distributed copies of to the class. Any violation of the rules, and the student received not only a flunking grade, but a zero. Since the numerical grades were averaged out—without any sort of bell curve adjustment—it was possible to get and stay in deep trouble insofar as your English grade was concerned.
Fortunately, I led the pack with an 89% average. I thrived in Father Hageman’s class. Even though I told everyone I wanted to be a nuclear physicist, at the time I did not know that I had no head for the sciences and only an indifferent head for mathematics.
I remember Father Hageman assigned us to write one page essays (graded either 0 or 100—nothing in between). Being a good Catholic, I wrote a whole series of essays on Jesus Christ standing before Pontius Pilate. My writing style was influenced largely by what I gleaned from William Faulkner after reading only The Sound and the Fury and by my class in Latin I.
The only thing I remember clearly is when I actually used an obscure Latin construction called an Ablative Absolute in one of my English essays. The opening phrase of the sentence in question was “Cold sweat covering his dolorous countenance” followed by what I conceived Pontius Pilate was thinking.
Prett6y fancy for a 14-year-old! I guess I’m still the same kind of writer, though I generally avoid obscure Latin grammar. On the other hand, by now I have read all of Faulkner’s novels; so I can copy him with some degree of confidence.
Over the last quarter of a century, I have read over three thousand books. Ever since I was a sickly child unable to compete in physical sports with my age group, I have used books to feel good about myself and to ready myself to compete in a dog-eat-dog world. Now that I am retired, I find that reading still has huge benefits, particularly when it comes to keeping on an even keel as I enter my eighth decade.
If you want to see the last two thousand or so books I have read and written reviews for, look me up on Goodreads.Com using as your Google search field: Goodreads Tarnmoor.
In the meantime, here are ten of the best books I have read in the last year and a half presented in alphabetical order by the last name of the author:
Ivan Bunin: Collected Stories. Although he is virtually forgotten today, Bunin has written some of the greatest short stories ever penned by a Russian author.
Alejo Carpentier: Explosion in a Cathedral. If you think that a book about the influence of the French Enlightenment on the Caribbean couldn’t be fascinating, guess again!
Geoff Dyer: Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings. Superb essays on the theme of the special quality of an artist’s last works.
Tove Jansson: The Summer Book. A gentle and truly lovely book written by a Finnish author in Swedish, of course. If the name sounds familiar, remember the Moomintrolls.
Clarice Lispector: Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas. This bizarrely beautiful Ukrainian/Brazilian writer wrote short journalistic essays that are a classic for our times.
Lucretius: The Nature of Things. A long philosophical poem by an ancient Roman that, even today, is worth mining for the author’s unique insights.
John Cowper Powys: Wolf Solent. Another great work by an author who is almost forgotten today. Read this and you will think differently about living in a rural English town.
Juan Rulfo: Plain in Flames. This Mexican writer did not publish much, but these short stories will make you sit upright. Like John Webster, Rulfo could “see the skull beneath the skin.”
Georges Simenon: Strangers in the House. He wrote hundreds of mysteries, but writers like William Faulkner Patricia Highsmith, and John LeCarré recognized his greatness.
Olga Tokarczuk: House of Day, House of Night. This Polish Nobelist describes life in rural Silesia. As one reviewer wrote: “What emerges is the message that the history of any place–no matter how humble–is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one’s self and one’s dreams but also with all of the universe.”
Probably what all these works have in common is that they are not as well known as most books. Sometimes, the surprise of reading an author like Dyer or Lispector or Tokarczuk can take you to more interesting places simply because you have not heard of them before.
I am in the middle of reading a great novel by British author John Cowper Powys, namely Wolf Solent (1929). In 1960, he added a preface to the Macdonald & Company edition which summarizes what I am coming to see as one of the preeminent works of the last century:
What might be called the purpose and essence and inmost being of this book is the necessity of opposites. Life and Death, Good and Evil, Matter and Spirit, Body and Soul, Reality and Appearance have to be joined together, have to be forced into one another, have to be proved dependent upon each other, while all solid entities have to dissolve, if they are to outlast their momentary appearance, into atmosphere. And all this applies to the difference between our own ego, the self within us, the being of which we are all so vividly aware as something under the bones and ribs and cells and vessels of our physical body with which it is so closely associated. Here we do approach the whole mysterious essence of human life upon earth, the mystery of consciousness. To be conscious: to be unconscious: yes! the difference between these is the difference between life and death for the person, the particular individual, with whom, whether it be ourself or somebody else, we are especially concerned.
As I mentioned at the beginning of January, I typically read books in this first month of the year written by authors I have not read before. Well, last month’s total was eleven books:
Maxim Osipov: Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories (Russia)
Dorothy Parker: “Men I’m Not Married To” (USA) – short story
Llewelyn Powys: Earth Memories (Britain)
George MacDonald: The Princess and Curdie (Scotland)
Alejo Carpentier: Explosion in a Cathedral (Cuba)
Olga Tokarczuk: House of Day, House of Night (Poland)
Joseph Joubert: Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (France)
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez: Dirty Havana Trilogy (Cuba)
Fleur Jaeggy: Sweet Days of Discipline (Switzerland)
Luis Vaz de Camoens: The Lusiads (Portugal)
Leonardo Padura: Havana Red (Cuba)
Three of the books were by Cuban authors, and I enjoyed all three of them. Only three were originally published in English. Three of the authors were women, most particularly Olga Tokarczuk, whose House of Day, House of Night was by far the best book I read last month. Second best was Carpentier’s Explosion in a Cathedral, followed by Powys’s Earth Memories.
Were there any clunkers? I am pleased to say “No, not a one!”
To understand where we are today, I believe it is important to go back in time and read works written in the more distant past. In the middle of reading The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection (New York Review Books, 2005), I am confronted by the philosophical fragments of a man who never published during his lifetime. He kept copious notes, however, which were published after his death. During his lifetime, he was best known as Napoleon’s inspector general of French universities.
Following are a number of his maxims which struck my eyes as I was reading his book.
It is not facts but rumors that cause emotions among the people. What is believed creates everything.
All truths are double or doubled, or they all have a front and a back.
What comes through war is given back through war. All spoils will be retaken, all plunder will be dispersed, All victors will be defeated and every city filled with prey will be sacked in its turn.
Clarity of mind is not given in all centuries.
When men are imbeciles, the one who is mad dominates the others.
The only good in man is his young feelings and his old thoughts.
Everything is double and is made up of a soul and a body.
You have searched in vain, you have found nothing but envelopes. Open a hundred, open a thousand, you will always be stopped before opening the last. You think you have touched the essence when you take off the outer skins. You take the homunculus for the animal. But it is much deeper…. In each drop is a drop, in each point another point.
They suddenly appear on Page 207 of Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (1988), a strange sect known for sharp knives:
They spent their days singing psalms and making knives. They made blades better than anyone in the whole of Silesia and fitted them with carefully polished handles made of ash wood, which every human hand fell in love with instantly. They sold them once a year in early autumn when the apples were ripening on the trees. They held a sort of fair, which attracted people from all over the district; they each bought several knives, sometimes as many as a dozen, in order to sell them on at a profit. During these fairs people forgot that the Cutlers were of a different faith and believed in a different God, and that it would have been easy to produce evidence and drive them away. For who would make such good knives then?
Whenever they bore a child they mourned instead of rejoicing. Whenever someone died, they undressed him, laid his naked corpse in a hole in the ground and danced around the open grave.
About forty pages later appears this poem, called “The Cutlers’ Psalm”:
Futility on all the earth blessed be barren wombs holy be all sterility sacred is decay, desirous is decline wondrous the fruitlessness of winter the empty shells of nuts logs burnt to ashes that still keep the shape of the tree seeds that fall on to stony ground knives gone blunt streams run dry the beat that devours another’s offspring the bird that feeds on another’s eggs war that is always the start of peace hunger that is the beginning of repletion Sacred old age, daybreak of death, time trapped in the body, death sudden, unexpected. death downtrodden like a path in the grass To do, but have no results to act, but stir nothing to age, but change nothing to set off, but never arrive to speak, but not give voice
The Brontë Sisters as Painted by Their Brother Patrick
When the Brontë sisters began publishing their novels in the early 19th century, they did not use their original names. They figured they would find greater acceptance if they used men’s names. Consequently, Charlotte published under the name Currer Bell; Emily, under the name Ellis Bell; and Anne, under the name Acton Bell.
For most of history, there have been precious few women writers whom we know by name. Among the ancient Greeks of the 6th Century BCE, there was Sappho of Lesbos. Then we have to skip forward to the Middle Ages to find Christine de Pizan. In the 17th and 18th centuries, there were a handful of names, including Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Anne Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, and Charlotte Smith in England as well as Mme. de Lafayette and Mme. de Staël in France.
In the first thirty years of the Nobel Prize in Literature, there were only three women: Selma Lagerlöf, Grazia Deledda, and Sigrid Undset. More recently, the distribution of Nobels is more equitable. Partly, that is because good literature is becoming increasingly female. I am currently reading Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night. In the recent past, I have enjoyed the work of Wisława Szymborska (Poland), Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus), Annie Ernaux (France), and Toni Morrison (U.S.A.)—all winners of the Nobel Prize.
No doubt about it, the future of literature is looking ever more female.
Tarnmoor 
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