Recently: Eastern Europe and Me

Kathleen Stocking’s essay about her Peace Corps teaching experience in Romania probably kicked it off. “Something Else Week” is the title of one of the essays in Kathleen’s new book, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale.  Then, can Russia be considered Eastern Europe in some sense? Letters from Russia, by a Frenchman who traveled to Russia in 1839, surprised me by how much 19^th-century czarist Russia sounded like things I’d read and heard about life in the U.S.S.R. in the 20^th century.

The late Tony Judt wrote of past and present all over the world, but one of his special areas of interest and expertise was Eastern Europe, a geographic area he felt had been sorely neglected by Western historians. While I may never make my war entirely through Postwar, many of Judt’s essays posthumously edited by his widow and published under the title When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010 either focus on or somehow make reference to Eastern Europe.

Halfway through my reading of the Judt collection, I plucked from my bookstore shelves Cafe Europa: Life After Communism, by Slavenka Dakulic, and took it home to read. Cafe Europa is a book that’s been in the shop for a while now, without anyone buying it and carrying it off – luckily for me, or I might have missed reading it. The author, born in Croatia in 1949, writes of the changes her native land has seen in her lifetime and the difficulty of shaking habits, mental and social, that may be holding back the arrival of truly responsible democratic citizens. Again and again in Drakulic’s essays comes the theme of the rewriting of history, still going on in Eastern Europe although Communism is gone.

Tony Judt was concerned with rewritten history, also, as was the Marquis de Custine when trying to understand Russia under the czars and where it might go from there. You might say that an interest in Eastern Europe leads naturally to a concern for honest history, given the way the subject has been mistreated in that part of the world. Not only there, of course, but to an important and serious extent, beginning in the past and continuing in the present. Another feature common to Judt’s and Drakulic’s essays is the idea that “Europe,” as a unitary place, the salvation of smaller countries from Russia to the Atlantic and the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean, is itself a myth, a vague article of faith with little correspondence to reality.

Time for a switch to fiction – and what jumped out at me? War with the Newts, by Karel Capek, with a little upside-down caret over the ‘C’ that I can’t find in my “insert symbol” menu. This novel, “considered by many to be Capek’s greatest book,” is in the “satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut,” according to the blurb on the back. I also find there this account of the author:

Karel Capek (1890-1928) earned recognition as a journalist, playwright, and novelist in Prague before and just after the First World War. In the Czech Republic of the 1920s, his reputation was broadened by the international acclaim that greeted his play R.U.R. as well as subsequent novels and stories....

What did I expect? Whatever it was, it wasn’t what I found inside the covers of this paperback novel. This “Eastern European” novel, at least as far as I’ve read so far, is set mainly in the South Seas, where the captain of a freight-carrying and pearl-fishing expedition boat encounters a colony of – well, we are not sure yet what they are. Newts? Lizards? Tritons? They live in the ocean but are very dexterous and quick verbal learners. Preyed upon by sharks, the tapas (as the narrator calls them, following local native practice) bring up pearl-bearing oysters to the captain subsequently trade him pearls for knives, and eventually learn not only how to open oysters with the knives but how to use them to kill sharks. The plot has thickened considerably! What next? I’ll let you know how it goes. The real question will be how much of the political satire I am able to decode from the story.

And in my Bohemian country neighborhood, as you can see, the farms are doing well. 

Visiting Fictional Worlds in January

My introduction to M. J. Rose was with the novel, The Book of Fragrance, much of it set in Paris. With her new work of fiction, Seduction, once again Rose seduces readers with a journey of exploration into the mysteries of mind and time. We walk beaches and descend into caves on the Isle of Jersey. Traveling to the past, we sit in seance with Victor Hugo as he tries desperately to make contact with his drowned daughter. Do you believe in ghosts? This novel will suspend your disbelief and hold you enthralled.

What I Was, by Meg Rosoff, took me by surprise. The slim volume opens with an unhappy young boy, going off to yet another English boarding school, anticipating yet another academic and social failure. When a new relationship blooms to change his life forever, it isn’t the one you expect—and you certainly don’t anticipate where it will go. Like Seduction, What I Was is set in the United Kingdom, the latter on England’s rocky coast.

What can I say—what do I need to say—about Alexander McCall Smith’s Miracle at Speedy Motors, another in the series of books about Mma Ramotswe of Botswana’s fictional Ladies #1 Detective Agency? These stories never disappoint me. I love my visits to Botswana’s world of red earth and bush tea, and I enter completely into Precious Ramotswe’s investigations and home life. She is not perfect, and sometimes her errors embarrass her, but she is a good, kind, thoughtful, and strong person. Her beloved father would be very proud of her!

The Land of Green Plums, by Herta Müller, brought a radical shift in mood, as I moved from sunny, democratic Botswana to find myself in bleak Romania under a harsh dictatorship permeating every institution, every place of work, and every personal relationship. The best future the young people can hope for is escape. The style and chronology of the novel are disorienting, probably intentionally so. I was halfway through before I “found my feet,” and even then the going wasn’t easy but was well worth the effort.

Then there was The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb. Put off by the length of Lamb’s novels, I had never read one before but something about this one—maybe the title—drew me in. Beginning with the actual shooting at Columbine High School, Lamb takes his fictional narrator, a high school teacher, back to childhood and forward years after the event, exploring different kinds of violence, what it means to feel like an outsider, family secrets, marital and family relationships, disturbed adolescents, post-traumatic stress, women’s prisons, and so much more that I know the list begins to sound like a sociology textbook, but believe me, it reads like real people living real lives, and everyone I know who’s read it says the same. For the first 200 pages you wonder if you’ll be able to read on much longer—how can you stand to keep going???--and then you are so caught up that you can hardly put the book down to attend to your own life, wanting to know what is going to happen to Caelum, Maureen, Velvet, and every incidental character whose life intersects with theirs.

And now, the novel I’m reading at present: Very unlike any of these others, The Son of Marietta, by Johan Fabricius, published in 1936, opens with a group of “players” (actors) traveling in horse-drawn coaches across central Italy in late fall. They stop at an inn in a provincial cathedral town. One of the women with the troupe has a baby but is unable to nurse the crying child, and after the landlord’s wife offers her own breast the child is left behind, with a little money, and grows up in the public house. Later, for a few years, the girl Marietta takes refuge in a convent, and there the new bishop finds her and takes her into his own home, first as help to his housekeeper, then as his almost-adopted daughter, and—then? I am about a quarter of the way through the book, and the main character, he of the title, has not yet appeared on the scene. This is not a fast-moving story. And yet the portraits are well drawn, and the situations, though far from modern, are very recognizably human, so I am not at all impatient. It is a luxurious escape on cold winter nights, a good excuse to go to bed early!

Have you read any good novels lately?