The Devil & World War 2: Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop

There are lots of reasons I ordered up a copy of Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop as soon as I heard about it: the book addresses historical memory and World War 2, I seem to have an affinity for Czech absurdism and humor, I’ve visited all the novel’s main settings (Terezín, Prague, Minsk, and Khatyn), and I was eager to read more of Alex Zucker’s work after enjoying his translation of Patrick Ouředník’s Case Closed. Alex translated The Devil’s Workshop from the Czech book known as Chladnou zemí.

The Devil’s Workshop is a sneakily powerful novel narrated by an unnamed man who came into the world because his father rescued his mother at the liberation of the concentration camp in Terezín, also known as Theresienstadt. As an adult, the narrator works with Lebo, a man who’s everyone’s uncle: Lebo was born in the camp during the war and makes it his mission to preserve everything related to the camp, save the town, and make it a bigger attraction. Lebo and the narrator eventually gather plenty of money and plenty of people in Terezín… but then things fall apart when they become victims of their own success and are accused (among other things) of having a commune. With orgies.

Before too long, the narrator (carrying a thumb drive loaded with contact information for donors) is escaping the Czech Republic, lured to Belarus by Alex and Maruška, who are building their own war-related museum:

The museum we’re building in Khatyn, Alex says. It’s going to be the most famous memorial site in the world. The devil had his workshop here in Belarus. The deepest graves are in Belarus. But nobody knows about them. That’s why you’re here!

About twenty pages later, Alex bemoans the existing “boring, old-style memorial” at Khatyn:

That won’t get the attention of the new Europeans. Look at the Poles and that Katyn of theirs! A step ahead, again! They’re shooting a movie about it! And what about our Khatyn? Nobody’s even heard of it.

Khatyn, Belarus

Alex’s plans for Khatyn include oral history and authenticity in a combination I can only describe as ghoulish. I shuddered (physically!) when I realized the plan for the museum… it’s a logical conclusion for the novel but it’s also a logical extension of real-life issues that generate lots of debate these days, things like the transformation of museums into interactive experiences, monetization of human suffering, and spectacles like Bodies… The Exhibition.

I seem to read a fair bit about historical memory and World War 2—the far more optimistic Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman is another World War 2-related book that comes to mind after a recent reading—but the combination of dark humor, tragedy, imagination, and twists on the realities of Belarus give The Devil’s Workshop a particular relevance that makes me more than willing to forgive the novel’s slightly uneven pacing and characterization. Finally, I’m happy to report that Alex Zucker feels fully in control of his material with this book, too: I barely noticed that the book lacks quotation marks (this is a feat), and he does a beautiful job making choppy and colloquial language wonderfully readable. That’s very difficult, particularly in a book like this, with its humor, remnants of war-time suffering, and strong voices, but he sure makes it look easy.

Disclaimers: I know Alex Zucker through the American Literary Translators Association. I bought the book.

Up Next: Rose Macaulay’s quirky The Towers of Trebizond, MacDonald Harris’s comically metaphysical The Carp Castle, and Niccolo Ammaniti’s gritty As God Commands.

Image: Part of the memorial at Khatyn, photo by Veenix, via Wikipedia, Creative Commons.

The -Morphoses, Meta- and Meow-

What is it with me and Czech absurdity? I loved the nasty humor in Ludvík Vaculík’s The Guinea Pigs (previous post) and Patrick Ouředník’s Case Closed (previous post), and now here I am with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung), which I first read, in Stanley Corngold’s translation, in high school. Warning: this post contains spoilers.

Rereading The Metamorphosis makes me wonder about my teenage fascination with the book. Namely: Did I fear waking up and thinking, like Gregor Samsa, the story’s protagonist, that I’m a giant beetle? And that I will dry up and drop dead, lonely, alienated, and shut away in my room? Or did I identify with Gregor’s younger sister, Grete, a not-so-skilled violin player who grows weary of the burden of having a coleopteran brother? Another option: I felt guilty about my enjoyment of collecting insects in sixth grade, feeling remorse after a June bug that revived itself in my hand when I attempted to take it out of the kill jar.

This time around, I did something responsible mental health professionals should discourage: I simultaneously read The Metamorphosis and two of Nikolai Gogol’s St. Petersburg stories, one of which is called “The Nose,” in honor of the breathing apparatus of a man who wakes up missing his nose, only to discover it walking the streets. In uniform. Though the stories made my delicate psyche a bit uncomfortable, the unintentional parallel reading was instructive: Gogol’s stories—like The Metamorphosis, in which poor Gregor awakes from “unsettling dreams”—involve fog and dreaminess, too. Alongside the clashes of reality and dream I also found clashes of ideas/artists/writers with plodding/philistines/bureaucrats. To quote Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature piece about The Metamorphosis, “The Samsa family around the fantastic insect is nothing else than mediocrity surrounding genius.”

I think this interpretation nicely complements a passage from Kafka’s diary, dated August 6, 1914, that Corngold quotes in the introduction to his translation:

“What will be my fate as a writer is very simple. My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner self has thrust all other matters into the background; my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle.”

This state rather resembles Gregor’s and complements Nabokov’s discussion of The Metamorphosis as a fantasy, a version of the world unlike usual reality if reality is a composite picture of the world. Though Nabokov mentions that characters like Gregor try to escape dull everyday lives—and, for Gregor, his bedroom—he writes little of freedom, which rates a few mentions in The Metamorphosis. Gregor enjoys looking out his window, “evidently in some sort of remembrance of the feeling of freedom he used to have from looking out the window.” Later, the nasty Grete, reduced to “his sister,” discusses the identity of the bug in the other room—a bug that Nabokov has helpfully reminded us is “just over three feet long”—saying:

“But how can it be Gregor? If it were Gregor, he would have realized long ago that it isn’t possible for human beings to live with such a creature, and he would have gone away of his own free will.”

But how could a three-foot beetle like Gregor just walk or even fly away, particularly after being injured by his own father? The human—or coleopteran—condition is absurd indeed. The only solution Gregor sees is to disappear. Which he does, shortly after three in the morning, after a “state of empty and peaceful reflection” that doesn’t resemble his unsettling dreams in the beginning of the book. Thus ends Gregor’s life and Gregor’s metamorphosis. I don’t remember finding the ending of The Metamorphosis so sad in past readings but Gregor seemed, to borrow again from Nabokov, especially “tragically absurd” this time. I suspect this was partly due to the effect of the contrast with a more comical brand of absurdity… including the afore-mentioned Case Closed and Guinea Pigs.

I followed The Metamorphosis with something more comically absurd: The Meowmorphosis, a Quirk Classic authored by Franz Kafka and Coleridge Cook. In this version of Kafka’s tale, Gregor awakens to find that he “had been changed into an adorable kitten.” This Gregor wants to knead the coverlet… and wonders how he “should reorganize his life from scratch.” Much of The Meowmorphosis replicates The Metamorphosis, albeit with changes that transform Gregor yet again—from insect to feline and from ugly to cute—but Cook inserts a long passage in the middle of the book, in which Gregor leaves his room for the streets and meets some other cats who have undergone metamorphoses of their own. I won’t reveal too much but will say that Gregor is put on trial by a cat known as Josef K., which brought me back to reading Kafka’s The Trial (Der Process) in college.

Cook also includes mentions of “writer issues” that segue into a humorous but very topical discussion of cats and dogs that begins with this: “Psychiatry is a dog’s profession, not a cat’s—a cat thinks what he thinks and that is all.” A bit later the cat says, “What we desire, we perform, and that is what is meant by freedom.” He goes on to admit that “cats know they are monsters and have no particular qualms about it…” Of course poor Gregor, whom the other cats have vilified for obeying his family, has to return home to close the story properly. “They are family and must endure me,” he tells himself, thinking they will take care of him. If only!

The Meowmorphosis was a fun way to cool down a bit after Gogol and Kafka; though Gregor faces the same sad end in both books, I certainly appreciated the comical absurdity and irony of Gregor turning into a cute and fuzzy (albeit rather large) animal instead of an ugly bug. Though you could read The Meowmorphosis without having read Kafka, I think Meow- probably has maximum enjoyment potential for those who’ve read Meta-.

Up next: Undecided.

Disclosures: I received a review copy of The Meowmorphosis from Quirk Books, from Eric Smith, whom I enjoyed meeting at BookExpo America in 2011. Thank you! Eric (who’s a friend on Facebook) also sent me a Meowmorphosis poster that I hung in the bathroom, much to the surprise of at least one dinner guest. Also: I met and chatted with the writer known as Coleridge Cook at a literary event.

Image credit: Coleopteran collage from Bugboy52.40, via Wikipedia. 

More Czech Absurdity: Ouředník’s Case Closed

It would be an overstatement to say that I didn’t understand Patrik Ouředník’s Case Closed (translated from the original Ad Acta by Alex Zucker)… but it would also be an overstatement to say that I know, for sure, for definite, what Ouředník wanted to say in this book about, ostensibly, some criminal acts and investigations. The book feels a little mixed up to me, with, perhaps, one too many subplots and thematic threads for its 143 short pages, but Case Closed is so funny—thanks to that Eastern European absurdity I love so much—that I was more than happy to just read along and laugh, writing “ha ha” in my margins. Which may, I think, be the point…

The most central character in Case Closed is one Viktor Dyk, a grumpy retiree who collects beetles, has written a forgotten novel, and generally dislikes people. He also loves inserting invented information into conversation:

“Dyk had a habit of pulling pronouncements out of his noggin and dressing them up with fraudulent, usually biblical, sources. Long ago he had come to realize that repeating what someone else had once said was considered the utmost expression of intelligence in his country.”

Viktor, who’s been something of a ladies’ man, also loves analyzing the personals. A piece:

“None of them were attractive, but plenty of them had been told they were attractive, or were of athletic build (great, a discus thrower…). COME INTO MY VOICE MAIL, as one ad was headed, struck Dyk as near pornographic.”

I also got some good laughs about Viktor’s love of taking public transportation at rush hour so he can knock people on the shins with his cane. And belch, releasing odors.

Ouředník doesn’t limit himself to describing Dyk’s misanthropy: he also discusses language. Throughout the novel, Ouředník slips in lines like “For Dyk, Jr., though, it was further proof that language was useless, being utterly unfit for interpersonal communication.” Ouředník obligingly offers up, as proof, conversations with miscommunication. From another angle, we learn that writing’s not all Papa Dyk might have wanted since, “Writing novels turned out to be much less fun than collecting beetles.” And we read that novels and life are similar. The narrator says, “We began this story with no clear aim or preconceived idea,” and the thought thread about novels culminates, later, with this:

“By now our readers have definitively understood that they definitively understood nothing: what could be a more sensible conclusion to our novel that than? Acceptance of fate, acceptance of one’s lot, acceptance of one’s imperfection. How simple, how biblical!”

That is, of course, my favorite kind of inconclusive conclusion about books and life. I just want to add two things… First, there once lived a man named Viktor Dyk who was a poet and conservative politician. (See photo.) Second, I loved reading Alex Zucker’s energetic translation, which contains lots of word play. The translation has a nice balance of risk and the feeling that Zucker is in control of his material.

Also, a quick note on The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar, which Harper released last week. The World We Found tells the story of friends, four women and two men, who went to college together in Bombay during the 1970s. They discuss a reunion of the four women when one of them, now living in the U.S., is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Though the novel contains some touching passages about relationships and the end of life, over all it felt predictable, even clichéd, particularly in the main plot line, in which one woman’s Muslim husband doesn’t want her to travel to visit her friend. I thought the interactions between the two man were the most interesting aspect of the book. Despite those misgivings, I should add that The World We Found was ideal reading when I was sick with a holiday cold.

Up Next: The Metamorphosis and The Meowmorphosis. Side note: I have to wonder if Dyk’s beetle collecting has anything to do with Kafka...

Disclosures: Thank you very much to Harper for sending me a review copy of The World We Found.

Image credit: Dezidor, via Wikipedia.

Favorite Books from 2011’s Reading

Naming this year’s reading favorites didn’t require (m)any hard choices: my top two books of 2011 were both so enjoyable, so perfect for my reading taste—which seems paradoxical since they are stylistically so very different—that I barely had to look over the year’s posts to be sure I knew what I was choosing. Here you go:

Favorite book originally written in English: John Williams’s Stoner (previous post) is beautifully written and structured, a neat novel about messy emotional lives.

Favorite book translated into English: Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog(previous post), translated from the German original by Ross Benjamin, is a wonderful book about life, death, and memory. Benjamin’s translation made me eager to read his translation of Joseph Roth’s Job, patiently waiting on my shelf.

A few other books stood out for various reasons:

Favorite twisted humor: Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude (previous post), with a main character called Miss Roach, and Ludvík Vaculík’s The Guinea Pigs (translated by Káča Pláčková from the original Czech) (previous post), with a main character who throws rocks at his own kids, were both filled with strange scenes and twists.

Favorite memorable scene: I especially loved the vivid carnivalesque Thursday dance night scene toward the end of Dawn Powell’s Dance Night (previous post)…

I wish everyone a happy, healthy 2012 that brings many new favorite books!

Up next: I’m not sure…

Disclaimers. The usual. A repeated thank you to those who sent me books mentioned in this post: Regal Literary (Funeral for a Dog), my bookstore friend (Slaves of Solitude), and Open Letter (The Guinea Pigs). Further disclaimer information is on each referenced page cited here.

Image credit: Fireworks in Bratislava, New Year 2005, from Ondrejk, via Wikipedia.

Experimenting with Life in The Guinea Pigs

Do you ever finish reading a book, close it, open it back up, page through to refresh your memory, close the book again, and then think (or even say out loud) “Huh?” That’s what I did when I finished Ludvík Vaculík’s Morčata (The Guinea Pigs), in Káča Poláčková’s translation from the original Czech; Open Letter is reissuing the book this month.

The Guinea Pigs is a cryptic, not-so-long novel about Vašek, a bank worker, and his relationships with his wife, Eva; two sons, Vašek and Pavel; mysterious co-workers, and their guinea pigs. The mindless repetition of arranging banknotes in the same direction – and probably other stressful aspects of living away from nature in Warsaw Pact Prague – gets to Vašek. Not only does he cuff his sons fairly regularly (and even throw rocks at them once!) but he begins to conduct odd experiments on the guinea pigs, late at night while he toils over bank paperwork. There are also problems at the bank: “And for that matter, why not admit it, we do steal.”

I could write about the abundant black humor and absurdity in The Guinea Pigs but, for me, the most striking aspect of The Guinea Pigs is the storytelling itself. Vašek (Father) tells his story primarily in the first-person, often directly addressing his readers and making us part of his world: on the second page he refers to “the brighter ones among my readers.” Two pages later he calls us “my dear young readers,” and on the next page he writes, “A viper, children, is a poisonous snake.” The story, as you’ve probably deduced, blackens tremendously over 180 pages, beginning as a darkly humorous tale and ending with an unexpected eleven-word sentence that completes the book perfectly, peculiarly. Please, dear people, if you read this book, do not look at the last page until you finish the book.

I read The Guinea Pigs as a Soviet-era scary folk tale of a novel that, though hardly a bedtime story, uses common motifs from fairytales. Trust me, this is the nifty part: it’s fun and instructive to look at how Vaculík incorporates into The Guinea Pigs many of the 31 elements that Russian scholar Vladimir Propp found in fairy tales. For example, Number 2, “Interdiction: the Hero Is Warned,” comes early on, when one of Eva’s young pupils predicts that someone (human or guinea pig?) in Vašek’s strange household will die. The girl is a storybook-like character herself, a seer who even knows Vašek carries guinea pigs in his pocket. Many of Propp’s other “narratemes” appear in the book, such as the classic Number 11, “Departure: “The Hero leaves on a mission.” There are also Vašek’s attendant quest for truths and discoveries of nasty things. Fairy tale-like elements, like a cottage outside the city, also turn up.

Of course fairy tale motifs are inherently flexible, and Vaculík works creatively, making Vašek a dualistic character – both hero and villain – someone who seeks the truth about strange goings-on at the bank even as he does horrible things to animals and his own family. Though Vašek can narrate (most of) his own story, he’s not fully in control of his destiny –none of us are, but he’s in the Soviet bloc, too – plus he has some complexes, too:

“The hardest thing in the world, girls and boys, is to change your life by your own free will. Even if you are absolutely convinced that you’re the engineer on your own locomotive, someone else is always going to flip the switch that makes you change tracks, and it’s usually somebody who knows much less than you do.”

Vašek offers another take on free will later in the book, tossing out this gem of a line, “The only thing anybody can kiss, when I select a book of delicate poetry from the bookcase, is my ass.” He continues his rant about doing as he pleases, then asks, “Was this enlightened thought [about free will and its limits] what my colleague Karásek had in mind when he brought up the significance of guinea pigs?” Yes, I think it is. Vašek lets his mind wander freely as he picks his nose, comparing (I think) the peculiar meaninglessness of human lives and guinea pig lives. It all reminds me of a college classmate who referred to the Habitrail of her life, though she did not invoke the taboo of nose picking. In the end, the root of our limited free will is, of course, the old inevitability of death, foretold by the pupil – and it is death, too, that grounds this mischievous existentialist laugh of a novel about the experiment of life.

Disclosures: I received a review copy of The Guinea Pigs from Open Letter; the book is a May 2011 release. A big thank you to Chad Post!

Up next: I’m not sure.

Photo credit: Portrait of Fori, from rosym, via sxc.hu.

Bookish Indifference: Not Much Laughter, Too Much Forgetting

Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim, left me with such a shoulder shrug and feeling of “whatever” that I think I’ll write more about the experience of reading the book than about the book itself. I loved the very first vignette about airbrushing a political leader out of a photo. But it didn’t even last the first page, though Kundera does mention it again later in the book. Tellingly, that vignette was the only part of the book I remembered from a reading in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s.

What I most wish I’d remembered from that first reading is that The Book of Laughter and Forgetting incorporates essayish material, metafiction, eroticism, and absurdity into stories about infidelity, family, politics, and death, creating and connecting (sometimes) variations on themes related to, of course, memory and laughter. I probably didn’t remember that from my reading twenty years because I’ve already nearly forgotten the book after reading it last week. I don’t say this to be mean or snarky: every now and than a book just don’t stay with me at all.

Now, I can handle genre blends and bends but I usually lose patience when the author can’t convince me that a book’s disparate elements belong together. Of course tastes and opinions about what does and doesn’t belong together vary greatly, but Kundera failed to convince me that Laughter and Forgetting is more than a rather random ramble through his thoughts.

By contrast, Mathias Énard’s Zone (previous post) is much longer and more difficult than Laughter and Forgetting in both form and content, but Énard’s jumpy narrative feels natural and uncontrived to me because it reflects the subject matter. After Énard’s book, which unified itself quite nicely, IMHO, with one long sentence, Kundera’s jumpy self-conscious narrative feels scattershot, contrived, and so unengaging, even smug with its clever comments, that the book barely registered on my emotions (other than petty annoyance) or memory, despite my interest in Czechoslovakia before the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

On the positive side, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting does have some good lines, such as this thought about writing:

“The reason we write books it that our kids don’t give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her.”

This is funny and apt, though hardly news to me, the person who’s been torturing her friends and family about Russian literature for decades. Thank goodness for the Internet, where I can blog about this stuff and find fellow enthusiasts! I’d most recommend The Book of Laughter and Forgetting to readers who enjoy disjointed books with the feel of oral storytelling, a taste of life in the Eastern Bloc, and an author’s pop philosophy.

I’d love to hear about other books and reading experiences that readers have found memorably unmemorable...

Up next: Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline.