Theme:  Eastern Europe

Perhaps you have asked yourself, as I have, where have all the good thinkers gone?  Where are the intellectuals?  Are they hiding under a table at a Parisian cafe refusing to give any thoughts on the state of the world today, much less a madeleine crumb of hope?  And where went the strong women writers who pen incisive social commentary without it lapsing into 'poor me, nobody dates the smart chick' collection of essays or a another 'poignant and brutally honest'  memoir about  addiction, childhood or a failed marriage? 

Well, step right up, ladies and gents, and meet Dubravka Ugresic.  Sure, the name may not be familiar to you, but it should be.  Born in the former Yugoslavia with a passport that states she is "Croatian" but now lives in Amsterdam, Ugresic is a world citizen.   Nobody's Home is a book of  essays that are tiny yet rich slices of a fresh baked reality cake.  There are to the point, funny and observant and leaving no ethnicity off limits.  This book is about 300 pages and I tore through it in ttwo days.  Ugresic's style reminds me of a well-trained athlete - no unnecessary movements, just the basics honed to perfection.  She does not waste a word.  But what are we talking about here?  Fashion, diets, relationships?  Ah, no.

Some of the topics Ugresic covers are: war, exile, flowers and communism, cultural identity, the memoir phenomenon, the concept of nationalism and sex trafficking.  I know, I know, but there are lots of women who write essays/columns that aren't about clothes, weight loss and dating the right man.  Maybe.  But more often than not, if they aren't about those things they are proponents of a particular political agenda pushing the feminist slant when it suits the cause.  Ugresic answers to no one and has no affiliation, just the affiliation of philosophy and thought-provoking reactions to society in general.  Here's a taste of her take on 'the European bazaar:

Europe is tired. During the twentieth century, Europe has spent itself on wars. ideologies, and Utopias.  Right now, Europe is doing what people are always happiest doing.  Europe is looking more and more like an open market, a yarmarka, a fair, a bazaar.  Money is the lingua franca of Europe and European unification.  Money is the most natural of languages.  There is a seller for everything, just as for everything there are buyers.  And while the ideologists of European unification are still tearing their hair out over a European identity (forgetting that identity is always articulated by contrast to an Other, which Europe has done with enthusiasm throughout its history), the European-ness of Europe is being determined by life itself.  the Chinese are settling Eastern Europe (Budapest has a China Town event though it hasn't been given the name officially), and Germans are buying summer houses in Sweden and Portugal.  The Dutch are snapping ip apartments in Moscow, the Serbs are buying in Budapest, the Italians in Croatia, the Muscovites in Italy...The migrations are not only moving North to South and East to West, as the demographers have feared they would, but also West to East, and South to North, and round and round in circles.  Dutch tomatoes, German yogurt, French cosmetics, Italian shoes.  Who could keep track of all that has occupied Eastern Europe?  The occupation is sensual, exciting and pleasurable; if it hadn't been, someone would have objected already.  Invisible money rustles, clinks, and pours from pocket to pocket.  While Europe's thinkers are searching for a harmonious formula for a new European-ness, America has virtually occupied Europe, promptly unifying the European East and the European West.

Similar differences in treatment exist between literature and--women's literature.  While literature gladly bears the burden of universalist values, women's literature wrestles with narrow, inborn specifics.  When women write about sex, for instance, their perspective is treated as female, while when men write about sex, their perspective is perceived as universal.  Although every writer is a "personality," "a self," in the practice of literary theory, literary history, and sociology, women writers are invariable "treated" in formations, in groups of two, three or four, especially if they come from small countries.  Two Bulgaria women writers, three Eastern European women writers...Gender-oriented female literary critics are seldom much help.  It turns out that a sisterly concern for the status of writing women has contributed to the promotion of women writers, but also to keeping the sisters ghettoized, with one difference--the ghetto has become more visible and loud.  The long-awaited right to create one's own self-definition in terms of gender, ethnicity, and race ultimately, in most cases, becomes a nightmare and a punishment.

But they know the crooked smile and also have been milkboys
before they got their wrinkles
and I'll walk on from West Bridge
I'll go in over the Central Station
I'll pass it in grey light and it will be lightly veiled
it will as always resemble an old tear-streaked film
and it will stab my heart as it always does
the usual alkies will there waiting for nothing
the young hitchhikers will stand there with the backpacks and their cartons of milk
hurried and harried people will wait for their connections
families will come with suitcases and baby carriages to take a weekend with the family in the country
and I'll stand in a corner and be overwhelmed
and not be able to do anything about it and not want it either
just be overwhelmed by all that life and the swarm
wet eyes without clear reason

Theme: Eastern Europe

                    


Gert Jonke is one of the preeminent authors who can create an illusion that slyly seduces the reader and then dismantles it right before our eyes leaving us to wonder what part of the fiction was fiction.  This may sound confusing or obtuse, and at times reading Jonke is just that - a confounding, vertiginous description of a story that turns the idea of story on its head.  Jonke died this year and I wanted to explore his place among the philosophical literary surrealists that include some of my favorites like Robert Walser and Gustave Flaubert. I began my Jonke journey with Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique (translated by Jean M. Snook) which is comprised of two parts:  The Presence of Memory and Gradus and Parnassum.  Both of these are narrated by Fritz, a young composer who is struggling with the expectations of his talent.  We don't sense this as much in The Presence of Memory because although Fritz is the narrator, he is the unreliable narrator that witnesses a reality that we are not sure he is creating or he is describing.  It begins with Fritz attending an annual party of two siblings that he attended the year before.  The siblings, a brother and a sister, want to recreate the exact same party as last year, having the people saying the exact same things and doing the exact same things.  To facilitate this idea, they have hung paintings on the trees in the garden that are paintings of what they are hanging on so that it is difficult to determine art and reality.  The siblings, Diabelli and Johanna, make Fritz initially uncomfortable with this idea:

It wasn't so much Diabelli's stubborn insistence on being right that alienated me as it was Johanna's smugness; and when she spoke of the circumstances of our lives, she always hinted at a still prevalent but next to unrecognizable form of suppression, consisting of all of us repeatedly being used to our disadvantage--primarily to demonstrate to several other people, at our expense, that the reassuring feeling they have that all things they do behind our backs are an indispensable precondition of our continued existence is entirely justified--and yet, while she said that sort of thing, she believed herself to be free of the stereotypes of this kind of existence, in which she herself would use others, pointing out their dependence, especially when it was a matter of their dependence on her, to confirm her own independence, to which she unconditionally subordinated the events of her private life--for example, the coming party.

I suddenly saw her walking on the other side of the street, turning down an avenue that ran through the fields of snow towards the train station, and having seen her, I stood motionless--though not without casting a happily hopeful glance at her gently swaying figure moving through the rows of trees--until I saw that she was all ready to leave on a trip, exactly as arranged, that she was having a hard time carrying two large suitcases, and so I thought, well, I guess we'll still be going away together today on that trip we've been planning for so long, and naturally I was already looking forward to using all the different means of public transportation at our disposal, and so I finally began to run after her, of course I wanted to cross over to her side of the street to help her carry her luggage, but I was prevented from doing so by the traffic that suddenly seemed very busy at that intersection.  Unfortunately, she hadn't seen me, so she continued walking purposefully along the avenue, without turning around, and only then did I succeed in crossing the street and hurrying after her as quickly as I could, already out of breath, until in the middle of the road, I can't explain it, she had, there's no other way to put it, you know, because it was impossible that she could already have reached the station that was still miles ahead of us, she had vanished into thin air, or become invisible, you know, simply gone, yes, and even her footsteps in the freshly fallen snow on the sidewalk simply stopped where she had disappeared, didn't continue either doubled back or sideways, there were only two long wide fresh imprints from the suitcases she had put down, yes, at that point of her life everything about her that could have left any visible traces had come to an end.

Yes, I'll gladly believe you because even reality is often a good invention.

So it had turned out to be exactly the same party as last year, right down to the smallest details:  much as I could no longer tell which photos were from last year's party or which were from the party this year, it was exactly the same now with the pictures surfacing in my memory:  when I thought of moments or events from the party last year or the party this year, I couldn't tell the pictures apart, they were also turning up in twos in my head, absolutely identical silhouettes and chains of associations from both events:  when I thought over my worries about the party, I no longer had the faintest idea whether I was worrying about this year's party or last year's:  as though, in my head, both parties had been identically depicted, each on its owntransparent film and then laid over one another with all the elementscoinciding...

End of the line! the conductor yells;  I push my way out of the streetcar and proceed onward and upward to the university. as on every other day; everything seems at the moment to have run its course again, but while I am looking from a window in the corridor on the second floor how the sheen-glinting streetcar tracks, over ad pass the heat waves of which multicolored swarms of butterflies aflutter in a summer bursting forth now are skimming and are woven into the air of this day like a many-colored pattern, alive and whirling, one of those dimwit assistants whom I still have to put up with suddenly draws me off to the side and whispers with a hoarse voice into my ear:  I have a history of music for you; I'm holding a history of music for your use, so I think you should be grateful to me...Then he presses an envelope into my hand and vanishes into the nearest auditorium, awkwardly fleeing my glance as if he were embarrassed by me but at the same time even more for me.

It was almost as if I were touching the caryatid across the distance from me to her, as if I could already feel her very deeply without having to cleave the surging stream of air between us, to swim toward the shoreline of her voice so as to gather up some of the flotsam and jetsam of her scarcely begun sentences from the breakers of her glances, trained on me still and now suddenly dropping down over me like a veil.  It seemed to me that I was "hearing" something, although "hearing" wasn't the right word; rather, it was an iridescent flutter and shimmer of shadows twinkling through the district.

Theme: Eastern Europe

(Originally published on Three Percent)

Reading Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole is like being lost in someone else’s nightmare where there are no exits. Karinthy creates an existential version of hell, stunning the reader not by blatant displays of horrifying circumstances, but by a gradual series of small failures that defeat and degrade the narrator and the reader. The narrator, Budai, takes the wrong door at the transit lounge and instead of going to Helsinki for a linguistics conference his final destination is an unknown city with an unknown language, an unknown nightmare.

Karinthy gives us no reprieve from the beginning. Budai is dropped off at an overcrowded hotel where, after he realizes he is not in Helsinki,decides that he will stay there until the next morning when he can go to the airport to catch a flight to Helsinki. And that’s when the never-ending lines begin. We wait with Budai in a long line until he finally reaches the ticket counter. After attempts to communicate with the receptionist in several languages—French, English, Finnish, Russian and German—he receives a room key after sacrificing his passport. And to another line we go with Budai, this time for the elevator. He spots a sign on the wall, written in the native language, that he attempts to find an identifying factor between this language and others—Cyrillic,Arabic, Chinese and Latin, but without any success. Oddly enough, Budai is able to recognize numbers and after stops on each floor and hoards of people getting on and off, he finds his floor and finally his room.The room resembles any other large city hotel room furnished with the usual bed, desk and bathroom. Since Budai has procured a bed for the night, hunger takes over and he ventures into the unknown city in search of sustenance. This is where Karinthy gives us description but no clues, as if Budai is an any man in a nameless city of the future where there is no distinguishable hint of a predominant ethnicity, just a conglomeration of all races. He waits in line at a restaurant while he tries to note any physical commonalities that might suggest people from a particular region:

Unfortunately there was a queue here too, quite a long one at that, because they only let in as many guests as were leaving so it was rather slow progress.He tried to size up others in the queue without drawing attention to himself. Some were white, some coloured; right in front of him were two coal-black, wire-haired, young men, a little further off an oriental-looking, pale-yellow woman with her daughter, but there were some tall Germanic types, one tubby Mediterranean gleaming with perspiration in his camel-coloured coat, a few brown-skinned Malays,some Arab or Semitic people, and a young redheaded woman with freckles in a blue woolen jumper, carrying a tennis racquet: it was hard to tell what race or shade formed the majority here, at least in front of the restaurant.

On the streets of this nameless‘mother city,’ Budai is pushed along, unable to resist the current created by the crowds moving around him. We continue on with Budai in his quest for food that morphs into a string of failures due to his inability to communicate with anyone. From the first, we feel the primal expressions of “the crowd” with its disregard for the individual, its coarseness and its brutality:

Back in his room he discovered that his body was covered in blue and green bruises from the blows he had received in the street when fighting hi sway through the crowd. He was not only bruised but tired and shocked to realize that he had not accomplished anything and had made no contact with anyone, neither with people back home, nor with people waiting for him at his destination. Neither at home nor at Helsinki would they have any idea where he had vanished. The strangest thing though was that he himself had no clue, not for the time being anyway: he was no wiser now than he had been on arriving here. Furthermore, he had no idea how he might set about finding out, about leaving, about where to go, about whom to speak to or what procedure to follow…He has a bad feeling and felt deeply uneasy, thinking he must have missed something or failed to do something, something he should have done but couldn't think what. He tried the phone again in his anxiety, fretfully dialing numbers anywhere, but it was late at night now, the phones kept ringing and only rarely did a sleepy voice respond and then in that peculiar,foreign-sounding, incomprehensible and indistinguishable language that sounded like stuttering.

And so it goes with Budai, a horrific stream of missed opportunities that lead to deeper isolation. And as readers, we are just as trapped as he is. The long,unsettling paragraphs of description we cannot turn away from because Karinthy leads us to believe that there might be hope just on the other side of the page. But there never is. We want so much to help Budai, help him find a way out, all the while being disconcerted that we know we would not fare any better in the same situation. We know that if he does not escape this city he will run out of money, which he does. We know that he will lose his hotel room because of this, which he does.We know that he will not get his passport back annihilating any chance of escape, which he doesn’t. We feel just as isolated and suffocated as Budai caught in an existential urban nightmare where we merely exist, but do not matter.

Written in 1970 and considered a modern classic in Europe, it is difficult to avoid comparing Karinthy to Kafka. It is, in fact, inevitable. Budai suffers humiliation,isolation, homelessness, loss of motivation, intellectual atrophy, brief imprisonment, loneliness that leads to lapses in his own morality, yet we never get to the apex of horror. Instead we drudge along on his degrading journey of imminent failures waiting for a moment of absolute despair or absolute hope. Because we never get either and so we encounter, ourselves, a sense of failure.

One element that seemed strangely absent from Metropole,is that Budai barely mentions his wife, his job, his friends. There is an obligatory nod to his past, but no time spent on what he misses about his former life, only the fact that he needs to escape where he is. Without this nostalgia or sentimentality, there is an even stronger sense of the dark night of the soul, an existential crisis that registers only with annoyance at where he is, but never to connect the reader with any real emotion of loss.

As a reader, we are drawn into Karinthy’s nightmare and Budai’s continual bad luck. For pure existential travails and societal anomie, this is a classic to be read. But I can’t help thinking, “What if Kafka had written it?”

Noteworthy

el mundo es una rodaja
amarilla
plana
y ardiente

maiz
antorcha de la noche

the world is a wheel
yellow
flat
and ardent

corn
the torch of the night

Porque crees que me has comprendido
has dejado de comprenderme.
Antonia Porchia

en este poema no hay
honmbres ni animales
ni cosas, en este poema
no hay sentencias
ni metaforas, en este poema
solo hay palabras que dicen:
en este poema no existe
nada salvo nosotros

in this poem there are no
men or animals
no things, in this poem
no sentences
or metaphors, in this poem
there are only the words that say:
in this poem there is only us.

Okay, that's a really, really loose translation.  But it is something like that and the sentiment is what a poem should be.  Who knew I would have to come to Jalisco to appreciate Austrian poetry?



And I know that every day that I have been here, I have mentioned Sexto Piso.  They carried a muy bueno libro,  Charles Bukowski's "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip", illustrated by Thomas Mueller.  I finally broke down and bought it because it is something that is easy enough for me to read while I try to learn Spanish.  It's published by Nordica Libros who also has other wonderfully illustrated short stories, including Bartleby, the Scribner by Herman Melville and Victoria by Knut Hamsun.  And if these don't make you believe that art and literature don't mix besides in graphic novels, check this out: