Herta Müller’s Hunger Angel

Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel, which I read in Philip Boehm’s translation of the original German Atemschaukel, is a painful but frighteningly lovely account of a young man’s internment in a Soviet labor camp after World War 2. Leo Auberg, who calls himself a Transylvanian Saxon, tells the story of his travel to the camp, his years spent there with coal, and his return to his family in Romania, to, among people, the grandmother who’d said “I KNOW YOU’LL BE BACK” and the “ersatz-brother Robert,” born while Leo was away. I think the term “ersatz-brother” gives a nice feel for the sort of dark humor Müller brings to the book, with, of course, crucial help from Boehm.

As a veteran of Russian camp fiction, the book took me back to Varlam Shalamov (for Müller’s brief, stabbing vignettes) and Solzhenitsyn (for Leo’s ability to find moments of relative happiness and his fear of freedom “outside”). But what struck me most about the book—probably largely because of my own interests—was Müller’s conscious use of language, both as a creative tool for herself as a writer and as a theme for Leo. Though her hunger angels, who hover over each prisoner, are strong, her use of language is even stronger as she creates ways to write about horrible experiences. Here are a few examples, plus some commentary from Boehm:

The Sound of Russian!: Early in the book, Leo says that “The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant, Shishtvanyonov: a gnashing and sputtering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch… After a while the commands just sounds like a constant clearing of the throat—coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus.”

As a Russian teacher who often tells her students not to make the sound kh so gutturally that they sound as if they’re trying to cough something up, this passage, well, struck me as a wonderful combination of finding a way to describe a language’s sound while finding a way to express the newness and unusualness of the sounds for Leo’s group. I even brought the book in to read the paragraph to my first-year Russian students, who’d commented on Russian’s harsher qualities.

A Mix of Languages/Hunger Words: A single word can generate a lot of thought for Leo: in “the skinandbones time,” Leo says the prisoners are given “kapusta,” cabbage, though “cabbage soup in Russian means soup that often has no cabbage at all,” a subversion of language. Leo then goes on to explain that “cap” in Romanian is “head” and “pusta” is the Great Hungarian Plain. “The camp is as Russian as the cabbage soup, but we think these things up in German,” he tells us. Leo then goes on to say that “kapusta” isn’t a hunger word… so he lists hunger words, words like mincemeat, hasenpfeffer, and haunch of venison, that inspire tastes in the mouth and “feed the imagination… Each person thinks a different word tastes best.” There’s also an episode a couple pages later where Leo is caught, by the afore-mentioned Shishtvanyonov, carrying cabbage [sic?] soup in bottles. Leo says he wants to bring the soup home. Though he’s not sure why he saved the soup, Leo reinvents the soup as a medicine, saving himself from punishment. Conclusion: the word “kapusta” can signify many things.

Homesickness & Parasites: For me, one of the saddest uses of language involved “homesickness” (mentioned as “heimweh”) as a euphemism for problems like lice, bedbugs, and hunger. A few pages later, Leo notes his personal uses of words and the separation of the words from what they signify, offering the example of the Russian “vosh’,” which he uses for bedbugs and lice, not remembering the meaning of “vosh’”to Russians. “Maybe the word can’t tell one from the other. But I can,” he says.

Also: The Cuckoo Clock: I have to mention that I thought Müller did nicely bringing clocks and the passage of time into the book, too. A chapter in the first half of the book is called “On the phantom pain of the cuckoo clock.” In it, Leo wonders, “Why did we need a cuckoo clock here. Not to measure the time.” Leo concludes that the barracks clock belongs to the hunger angel, saying a certain question [which invokes superstition] is most important, “Cuckoo, how much longer will I live.” When Leo returns home, alive, though many of his campmates have died, “The clock ticked away beside the wardrobe.”

To Summarize: The Hunger Angel felt especially successful to me because Müller balances the harshness of reality—camp deaths, camp privations, camp parasites—with a linguistic playfulness that simultaneously reflects and rejects that same reality. Episodes of absurdity mix with harshness, simultaneously giving the novel an air of reality and abstraction, as well as some wonderfully dark humor.

Finally, I want to say that I think Boehm’s translation finds a consistent voice, both fluid and linguistically marked, for Leo. Boehm quotes Leo in his Translator’s Note, “I carry silent baggage. I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words.” Boehm then writes of Müller, “In one novel after the other, it has been Herta Müller’s special calling to find words for the displacement of the soul among victims of totalitarianism.”

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of The Hunger Angel from publisher HenryHolt. Thank you very much!

Up Next: I’ve had a hard time finding something to follow The Hunger Angel… so settled on something predictable, another Swedish murder mystery. My next post won’t appear until mid-June, after BookExpo America.

The Journey of James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout

Walkabout, a short novel by James Vance Marshall (pseudonym for Donald Payne), is a peculiar trip through the outback with two children from a “comfortable home in Charleston, South Carolina” who are stranded after a plane crash. They set off on foot for Adelaide, meeting a lone Aborigine boy as they walk. I saw Nicolas Roeg’s film version of Walkabout in a sociology course in college so knew the basics—the trio of kids and the outback—but was surprised (though why!?) at how much tones differed, with the film stranding the kids through an episode of violence rather than a plane crash.

What I remember best about the film, which I saw, oh, about thirty years ago, is the contrast between meat for sale in an Australian city—prekilled, pretrimmed, for sale in bulk—and do-it-yourself meat in the outback. I don’t know if my memories are correct but that’s what stuck with me: urban life that’s far removed from nature, food sources, and metaphorically, a knowledge of self. Little of the “civilized” side of the food aspect of the contrast is contained in the book beyond a stick of candy that the girl, Mary, carries in her dress pocket. Once it’s gone, she and her brother, Peter, starve until they meet the boy on walkabout.

Marshall emphasizes differences in culture and behavior codes—or “sacred orders,” as we called them in my sociology course—with passages like this one about Mary, who’s rather inhibited:

The things that she’d been told way back in Charleston were somehow not applicable any more. The values she’d been taught to cherish became suddenly meaningless. A little guilty, a little resentful, and more than a little bewildered, she waited passively for what might happen next.

Beyond being embarrassed by nudity, Mary’s internal crisis has a racial element:

It was wrong, cruelly wrong, that she and her brother should be forced to run for help to a Negro; and a naked Negro at that.

But here’s Peter, who is younger and more able to adapt than his sister:

Peter watched him. Inquisitive. Imitative. Soon he too started to brush away the leaves and pluck out the blades of grass.

Marshall uses such obvious language often in Walkabout, occasionally taking an anthropological tone to tell us, for example, “Physically, the Australian Aboriginal is tough,” and describing walkabout in terms of tribal traditions.

The Biblical overtones in the book felt obvious, too, with the Aborigine boy taking a Christ-like role—he even teaches Peter to fish—and sacrificing his life. There’s also this line about a billabong, “The river that ran out of Eden couldn’t have been more beautiful.” And that brings me to the book’s biggest strength: descriptions of the landscape and its birds, plants, and non-human mammals, and observing how the children learn to use and respect nature so they can survive. Walkabout felt most successful when Marshall stepped back and let his characters be characters. I didn’t need him to tell me about their differing value systems, particularly given all he’s able to show through their differences in language, (in)abilities to find food, and comfort wearing clothing.

Up next: Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel, which has a strong Russian theme.

Disclosures: I read the New York Review Books edition of Walkabout, which I bought myself. I always enjoy speaking with NYRB about translated fiction.

David Albahari’s Leeches

I’m back at last, albeit with a book—David Albahari’s Leeches, in Ellen Elias-Bursac’s translation from the Serbian Pijavice—that I find rather confounding, with a diabolical combination of minutiae and whatever you call the accumulation of all the minutiae. Leeches is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read but didn’t particularly like... One of my difficulties is that Leeches is written as one 300-page stream-of-consciousness paragraph. But I admit it’s not Albahari’s fault that I couldn’t give Leeches the attention and concentration it deserved because cold viruses were replicating in my respiratory system, much like the obsessive thoughts about a plot that plague the book’s narrator, a Belgrade newspaper columnist who witnesses a man slap a woman down by the Danube on March 8, 1998. (I can’t help but notice that March 8 is International Women’s Day...)

Our hero, who never seems to record his name in his manuscript, finds, all over, clues to the meaning of the slap that lead him to seek out clues for understanding the clues, which lead him to corners of mathematics and the Kabbalah a bit esoteric for my head, virus-infected or not. Meanwhile, of course, the conflict over Kosovo is heating up in Serbia, something our unnamed hero notes regularly; chaos is personal, political, and literary in Leeches. The narrator mentions the strangeness of the political aspect of life, writing, “The encounters with the unbridled nationalists were so surreal that I didn’t even feel them to be a part of that reality.” The absurd and surreal aspects of the book—and the accompanying humor—were highlights of Leeches, particularly after my experiences living in post-Soviet Russia.

That’s probably why one of my favorite passages in the book describes a visit to a room where a portrait of Tito used to hang: “It felt as if that portrait had had its day a century ago, though only fifteen years has passed since then, and now it seems, maybe because I no longer live there, that its day never happened.” Questioning reality and history—particularly given nameless hero’s frequent pot smoking in the first half of the book—may not be the freshest theme in Leeches but it certainly feels right in this novel… and in many other books I’ve read about places, like the Former Soviet Union, where the countries and people caught up in geopolitical breakups seem to sense something akin to phantom limbs.

My very favorite passage in the book, though, is a favorite because of a personal connection. Our hero’s friend Marko, who disappears during the course of the novel, had a poet girlfriend who, during “a sudden and extremely unpleasant breakup… hit him on the head with a Benson English-Serbo-Croatian dictionary, until streams of blood were coursing down his forehead and neck…” This personal scene, I should note, takes place during a theatrical performance, in front of an audience, though it’s not scripted as part of the show: art, life, and imitation are all on display, with the audience “convinced it was part of the performance.”

Of course this mention of the Benson dictionary, written by the late Morton Benson, who attempted to teach me about the history of the Russian language when I was in grad school, gladdened me by reminding me of a professor who seemed to find it curious that his dictionary had made him a minor celebrity in what used to be known as Yugoslavia. Focusing on the Benson dictionary also gave me a framework for understanding one thin layer of Leeches: we have a breakup, bloodshed inflicted by a book of words from multiple languages, and even a language with two alphabets. Plus, of course, the meaning, significance, and impact (ouch!) of words, which our narrator tells us, later, “don’t count; they’re something else, as someone wrote recently, they never say what the speaker means for them to say, but what the listener wants to hear.”

That thought doesn’t feel particularly fresh, either, even within the context of the narrator writing his crazy account of crazy happenings, hoping to finish before his pen runs out of ink. He also tells us he won’t write “burn after my death” on the first page of his manuscript… there’s no guarantee, he says, that anyone would heed the command and he could burn the damn thing himself anyway. His exchange with himself reminds me, by the way, of Master and Margarita: both books take up the topic of (un)burning manuscripts and both feature heroines named Margarita/Margareta.

I could go on and on, just like Leeches itself, but let’s just say Albahari offers lots of chaos and humor in a long, long stream of words that talks about Jewish history, World War 2, manuscripts, math, violence, and trying to figure out how everything all fits together. Plus a few assorted mentions of leeches, which are cited as something to be gathered in swamps during the nineteenth century and compared with guns (both are “bloodletting”) a bit later. I’m not sure I have the patience to read Leeches again to get a better grasp of its mathematical and Kabbalistic corners, though I recommend it highly (no pun intended) to readers who enjoy novels where curious souls try to understand their broken-down societies on micro, macro, and mystical levels. Leeches was quite enjoyable. Even if I didn’t particularly like it.

I should also note that I thought Ellen Elias-Bursac, whom I enjoyed meeting at a literary translator conference last November, did a nice job translating what must have been a difficult text. Slavic tones came through the translation in good ways, and the text itself is very clear and readable.

For more: I’ve only touched on a few aspects of Leeches. For a deeper look at the story and its various histories:

Nina Herzog on Words Without Borders

Amy Henry on The Black Sheep Dances

Disclosures: Amy Henry gave me a review copy of Leeches that she received from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And I’ve met translator Ellen Elias-Bursac, as noted above. Thanks to all!

Up Next: Walkabout, by James Vance Marshall.

Absent/Present: The Truth about Marie

Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Truth about Marie, which I read in Matthew B. Smith’s translation of the French original La Vérité sur Marie, is a wonderfully elemental metaphysical romp. I’m not sure what that means, either, just as I’m not sure how to describe the book itself: it’s three connected chunks of text that verge on stream-of-consciousness, all narrated by a Nameless Guy who tells stories about his sort-of-ex-girlfriend, the Marie in the title, a fashion designer.

It was a dark and stormy night—a very hot summer night with thunder and lightning—in Chunk One, when I found Marie in her Paris apartment with a man who has a heart attack. Chunk Two, set in Tokyo before Chunk One, also involves a storm, plus the soon-to-be-dead-man’s racehorse, who doesn’t want to get in a carrier so he can fly. In Chunk Three, Marie is at a house on Elba, where Nameless Guy joins her; horses have a role in this piece, too, and there’s a big fire. All this makes for lots of furious air, water, and fire, plus some earth. The elements.

What’s most interesting about The Truth about Marie is that I didn’t feel like I learned much about Marie: Nameless Guy narrates all sorts of stories about what she does when he’s not around, inventing, but claiming,

“…I knew Marie’s every move, I knew how she would have reacted in every circumstance, I knew her instinctively, my knowledge of her was innate, natural, I possessed absolute intelligence regarding the details of her life: I knew the truth about Marie.”

He tells us what she does and wears when she gardens on Elba (apparently) he gets there: “rather kitschy flip-flops, with a plastic daisy in bloom in between her two big toes.” He tells us how Marie and the soon-to-be-dead-man riding in a cargo plane with the racehorse (Zahir, who is named for a Borges story) after the horse bolts and shuts down Narita airport. And we know that Marie loves chaos and leaves things open: luggage, drawers, and so on. But I didn’t feel like I learned many heavy, deep, or real truths about the ethereal Marie.

That’s not a complaint. It’s good because Nameless Guy offers plenty of scenes with situations that present universal truths that go far deeper than describing only Marie. These truths that relate to Marie are truths about all of us:  sudden death and changes of fate, the evocation of a summer storm that feels “tropical and pernicious,” and (ouch, ouch, ouch!) emptiness and absence. In reminiscing about Marie, the narrator mentions watching the bank across the street from Marie’s apartment, at night, saying,

“…all of this taking place in what seemed like a suspended moment in time, dynamic and intense, a moment of pure nothing, an emptiness charged with an invisible energy ready to explode at any instant, a gap continually animated by little events, unrelated, trivial, small in scale, occurring at regular intervals so that right when we’d be ready to go back to bed the tension would flare up again and put us back on guard…”

That piece of a sentence (it’s not even half) is a nice splinter of the book, which is composed of moments that Toussaint, too, makes feel unreal, suspended, empty yet concrete, immediate, and blaring with drama. That sort of paradox fits something Nameless Guy says about Marie, as well, “I loved her, yes. It may be very imprecise to say I loved her, but nothing could be more precise.”

My own truth is that I enjoyed The Truth about Marie very, very much, particularly its end, which is something resembling sunny, warm, and happy, where absence turns into presence—that’s what people need after all—at least for a time, and the narrator shifts to the second person [edit: oops, sorry, this sentence includes an example of direct address, which feels just as significant (if not more significant?) than using the second person] in the final sentence, after having already used the first and third persons. I thought Smith’s translation read very nicely, creating a voice that offers a welcoming balance of humor, melancholy, and sincerity. The writing had a nice rhythm, long sentences and all. I’m looking forward to reading more of Toussaint, including his previous books about Marie, one of which Smith translated.

Disclosure: I bought my copy of The Truth about Marie… but should note that I’ve enjoyed speaking with Dalkey about literature in translation.

Up Next: David Albahari’s Leeches, another book on the longlist for the Best Translated Book Awards. Others that I’ve read, in addition to The Truth about Marie, are, with links to past posts: My Two Worlds (Sergio Chejfec, tr. Margaret B. Carson), Zone (Mathias Énard, tr. Charlotte Mandell), and Funeral for a Dog (Thomas Pletzinger, tr. Ross Benjamin). I have two others on the shelf that I plan to read soon: Scars (Juan José Saer, tr. Steve Dolph) and Stone Upon Stone (Wiesław Myśliwski, tr. Bill Johnston).

Cause & Effect: César Aira’s Varamo

César Aira’s Varamo is a wonderful Rube Goldbergesque novella, an elegant and humorous conglomeration of seemingly incongruous actions, consequences, and objects that combine to show the reader how a third-class clerk in Panama named Varamo receives his pay in counterfeit money and comes to write a “masterpiece of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Child” by the next dawn. I read Varamo in Chris Andrews’s translation.

Colón, Panama, in 1910. Varamo takes
place in 1923.

Aira’s story examines creativity and representation, following Varamo, a civil servant lacking special job skills, as he goes home after receiving the fake money: at home he works on a taxidermy project involving a fish and, eventually, uses his notes about the fish as a basis for his poem. (Original title: How to Embalm Small Animals.) At the end of the book, we find truth as the “raw material” for fantasy plus some peculiar observations on permanence. Varamo’s city, Colón, for example, remains as long as he does, and Varamo discovers that a die-shaped piece of candy he had stuck to a branch hours before remains stuck, despite having been pecked, daintily, by birds.

The fish has a stranger fate, and it’s interesting to see the poor thing as the object of two creative projects. The first is an attempt to make the fish appear, in death, as something more than it had been in life: a piano-playing fish. Then, if I understand this correctly, the chronicle of Varamo’s work on the fish becomes, through transformations involving random papers and a Rosetta Stone-like document that Varamo obtains through a chance meeting, the famous poem.

I found Varamo particularly fun because Aira suffuses his story with mentions of chance, accidents, improvisation, anarchists, literary genre, and cause and effect. Two examples:

The poem’s capacity to integrate all the circumstantial details associated with its genesis is a feature that situates it historically.

and 

Like all adults, he was afraid of accidents. What dismayed him most about them was the temporal constant between the instant, or fraction of an instant, in which an accident could occur, and the long months or years required to repair its effects, if indeed they were reparable and didn’t last a lifetime.

I enjoyed Varamo very, very much, perhaps most for the lovely absurdities of its portrayal of the (or maybe “a”?) so-called writing process, a term I fought when I attended workshops at writing conferences years ago. For me, writing—and now translating—has never felt like an explainable process, other than certain mechanical actions, like sitting in a chair and applying fingers to a keyboard. I don’t believe in ethereal muses, either, but I do believe in cause and effect in the form of a myriad of mental processes, most of which occur rather randomly and quickly, (only, alas, to be forgotten, making me wonder how I (I?!) came up with my final drafts) that lead me to choose words that come together to create seemingly reasonable English-language versions of Russian texts. I don’t know Chris Andrews’s stance on any of this but I thought his Varamo established a voice that meshed nicely with the novella’s content, a voice that I looked forward to reading.

Disclosures: I picked up a copy of Varamo from publisher New Directions at BookExpo America in 2011. Thank you! I always enjoy speaking with New Directions about literature in translation.

Up Next: Anna Funder’s All that I Am. (My time for English-language reading has been at a new low in recent months because I’m teaching a college course this semester… but spring break is on the way!)

Photo Credit: Library of Congress, via Wikipedia.