Numbing the Pain: The Blindness of the Heart or The Midday Woman

I read a lot of dark, sad Russian novels about how societal and cultural breakdowns affect individuals, so when I read Julia Franck’s The Blindness of the Heart, translated by Anthea Bell from the German original Die Mittagsfrau, I felt like I’d extended my borders westward. I love many of my Russian novels categorized as chernukha, a genre I usually describe as “dreary naturalism” or “crushing naturalism,” so I appreciate that Franck is unsparing in The Blindness of the Heart, using affectless narration to tell the story of a German woman who abandons her son just after the end of World War 2. The book is very good.

The woman, Helene, is a half-Jewish nurse who comes of age during the Weimar period. Helene’s life is difficult from the start of the book: her mother is mentally ill, her father fights in World War 1, and her older sister engages her in incest. Little gets easier for Helene, and when she and her sister go to live with their aunt in Berlin, she experiences further humiliations; her sister, also a nurse, develops a serious addiction. The one bright period in Helene’s life concludes all too quickly, and she marries a lout, though he obtains false identity papers for Helene, under the name Alice, that allow her to work.

The book is difficult to read for formal and emotional reasons: there are no quotation marks or dashes and Helene faces horrible situations and decisions that are difficult for a reader like me – I’ve had a fairly easy life without the challenge of wartime decisions – to imagine and absorb. The Blindness of the Heart focuses less on Helene’s decision to abandon her son than what leads her to make that decision. That decision is existential: Helene believes her time and energy are best spent relieving her patients’ pain, leaving her with nothing – essentially “as” nothing – to care for Peter. Death to Helene equals simply not being, and one of the terrible ironies of Helene-Alice’s life is that it is so full of pain, the very thing she tries to relieve in her patients.

Physical and psychic pain are constants in the book, as are dubious remedies like opiates and quiet suffering. Franck includes graphic descriptions of bodies and ills, effectively cascading dysfunction and upheaval from German society to human interactions and identity to anatomy. I particularly admire her ability to do that by focusing on private life rather than incorporating lots of information about history. Franck’s unemotional narrative voice and ability to convey the personal tragedy of social changes without hysteria, reflecting Helene’s state of mind, are what make The Blindness of the Heart succeed.

I’m particularly conscious of Franck’s restraint because lately I’ve read books with overlapping themes. One novel – about a Soviet-era college student who is half-Jewish and forges papers –fails, I think, largely because it’s so overwrought in places. I’ve also been rereading Liudmila Ulitskaya’s wonderful Daniel Stein, Interpreter, which includes a woman whose mother puts her and her brother in an orphanage during World War 2. I’m familiar with wartime abandonment from real-life conversations, too: the mother of a woman I knew in Moscow brought her to an orphanage as a young child, leaving her on the steps because she couldn’t feed her. Franck’s father’s mother, a nurse, abandoned him, too.

I want to mention one other thing about The Blindness of the Heart: its original German title, Die Mittagsfrau, refers to the “Midday Woman,” whom a Goethe Institut piece about Franck describes as a “ghost-like mythical character from Lusatia, the eastern German region where Helene was raised, who appears with the sun at noon. Her spell, which causes confusion, dizziness and even death, can only be resisted if her victim talks about themselves and their work.” Franck notes that Helene isn’t the Midday Woman saying, “In her life she doesn’t follow the advice of the myth. But she knows about it.” Helene and her sister think their mother was stricken by the Midday Woman but they both succumb to the spell, too, becoming numb, deadened, in different ways because they are unable – and even forbidden – to interact. With the numbness come personal losses as they deny within themselves the human qualities, the lives, they help their patients to recover so they can survive.

FYI: This book is known as The Blind Side of the Heart in Great Britain.

Disclosure: Amy of The Black Sheep Dances handed down her review copy of The Blindness of the Heart, from Grove Press. Thanks to both! I have spoken with Grove about literature in translation.

Up Next: I’ll be continuing with German novels for a bit, reading Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine.

Motoring Around Mr. Stevens's Head: The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day falls into the category of Books I Respect More than I Enjoyed. Is that good or bad? Damning with faint praise? I don’t know. The Remains of the Day and I have a long history: I bought the book shortly after it won the 1989 Booker Prize, read about half in the mid-nineties, set it aside, and lent it to a friend, who read about half before returning it. I had no trouble finishing The Remains of the Day this time around.

A plot summary for the handful of people on the planet who haven’t read the book or seen the movie: The Remains of the Day is a first-person story, narrated by Mr. Stevens, a career butler. Mr. Stevens tells us about a motoring trip in England, but the novel is more of a drive down the Memory Lane within his head. Mr. Stevens plans to meet with a former co-worker, Mrs. Benn, nee Miss Kenton, so he spends most of his time remembering his past – including some incidents with Miss Kenton – rather than describing landscapes. Mr. Stevens sees some beautiful landscapes, too, which Ishiguro plants so we observe Mr. Stevens gaining new perspectives on the world by venturing out of Darlington Hall, his home and workplace for many years.

Rather than rehash more of the book, I’ll focus on a few points that particularly struck me as I read…

Ishiguro’s Language. As with Never Let Me Go (previous post), Ishiguro constructs in The Remains of the Day a beautifully seamless, consistent narrative: Mr. Stevens’s voice is formal and sounds, at least to this American who has never met a butler, quintessentially butler-like with its politesse and phrases like “that is to say.” Some of his exchanges with Miss Kenton are heartbreaking in their circumlocution, though there’s also a fair bit of understated humor.

Dignity and One’s Place in the World. More heartbreaking, though, is the conflict between a servant’s personal and work lives. Mr. Stevens speaks frequently of his dignity, loyalty, and acceptance of his place in the world, even telling a visitor to Darlington Hall that “It is not my place to be curious about such matters [of global importance], sir.” But Mr. Stevens slips up, giving a group of strangers he meets on the road the impression that he himself spoke with world leaders about “great issues of the day.”

Lord Darlington, His Employer. At the end of the book -- and the end of a day -- Mr. Stevens speaks, on a pier, with a former footman he’s just met: they talk about their pasts, and Mr. Stevens confesses that Lord Darlington was courageous but also misguided. (I won’t reveal why except to say that the book involves discussion of world wars.) He also confesses that “I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?” The footman advises Mr. Stevens to stop thinking about the past so he doesn’t get depressed, a bit of advice that Mr. Stevens seems to take to heart, resolving to “adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day.” At the top of the list? Working on being more open to bantering with his new American employer, the man who let him borrow the car for the road trip. There’s nothing like a good road trip – or motoring holiday – to find a nice fork in the road, whether the road is on a map or inside one’s head.

Up next: Julia Franck’s The Blind Side of the Heart, a dark, dark novel about Germany, mostly between the world wars. It’s another book that’s very good but slow to read.

Location, Location, Location: The Oracle of Stamboul

Michael David Lukas’s The Oracle of Stamboul is a costume drama of a book, a fairytale-like story about one Eleanora Cohen, a fictional girl born in 1877, to the accompaniment of omens, including the presence of a flock of hoopoes. Eleanora’s mother dies in childbirth, and her rug merchant father marries her mother’s sister, who prefers that Eleanora learn housework instead of reading. But Eleanora reads, and she follows advice about following one’s heart that she gleans in her favorite book: Eleanora stows away on her father’s voyage to Stamboul, where she becomes a polyglot child prodigy and is invited to advise the sultan on important matters.

Publisher HarperCollins calls The Oracle of Stamboul “evocative,” which it is. Lukas describes settings, food, and clothing in intimate detail, making me crave Turkish coffee, pomegranate juice, and fresh flatbread. And his accounts of Eleanora’s love for reading are rather sweet: the girl’s favorite book is The Hourglass, a novel that is, as far I can tell, purely fictional.

Though Lukas generally writes consistently in a genial, sometimes old-fashioned style and fully convinced me he’d done his research, I can’t say he convinced me of Eleanora’s role in the history within this historical novel. The book’s plot turns felt predictable – most of them are obvious from the publisher’s description anyway – and character development suffers at the expense of all the vivid settings. Readers who enjoy rich descriptions with a magical flock of birds thrown in will love The Oracle of Stamboul.

For my part, I read The Oracle of Stamboul as a book about reading and knowledge rather than a book about history or a talented little girl. I held on to a small detail simply because it’s Russian: early in the book, Eleanora’s father holds up a copy of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin to prevent Russian soldiers from pillaging his house. The book, a classic Russian poem-as-novel, functions like a protective icon. Later in the book Eleanora finds solace and advice in books. Her beloved Hourglass is the true oracle of the book, inspiring Eleanora to continue a reading career that progresses to ancient classics, recognize life’s paths and plans, and make decisions.

The Oracle of Stamboul stimulates the senses of sight, smell, and taste more than the intellect, and I think the retro language and Eleanora’s flock of birds feel too mannered... but sometimes there’s something to be said for an easy-reading, escapist book that offers the warmth of Stamboul, along with that thick Turkish coffee, in the middle of a cold, snowy Maine winter.

Disclosure: I received an advance review copy of The Oracle of Stamboul from publisher HarperCollins. Thank you!

Up next: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day.

Photo credit: Hoopoe in Israel, portrait from MathKnight and Zachi Evenor, via Wikipedia.

What Price Discipline?: Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline

I seem to have a habit of calling books “atmospheric” when I damn them with faint praise: “atmospheric” feels like a code word for books with lots of detail and texture but very little story. But Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, an account of boarding school translated by Tim Parks from the Italian I beati anni del castigo, is different. At only 101 pages with lots of white space, Sweet Days of Discipline is just short enough, just long enough, and just elegant enough to feel complete as – here, I’ll say it – an atmospheric portrait of a young woman and her surroundings.

Our first-person narrator is a teenage girl sent to school in post-war Switzerland. She has a German roommate because her mother requested it; the narrator disdains the roommate and imagines her meeting dates in her sleep. Sweet Days of Discipline contains all sorts of early warnings that this isn’t a heart-warming tale of high school camaraderie: we learn in the first paragraph that writer Robert Walser walked nearby and died in the snow. On page two, the narrator tells us she remembers only Baudelaire from her study of French literature. I wrote “uh-oh” in the margin.

Flowers of evil, indeed: our narrator has girl crushes (or maybe something deeper?) on beautiful, perfect new girls, first Frédérique, later Micheline. What hides behind the perfection? Life at school, the narrator tells us, involves establishing “a façade, a kind of double life” – she even emulates Frédérique’s handwriting. Sweet Days of Discipline contains lots of other creepy little details, like the comparison of boarding school with a harem and reading “a few lines of Novalis about suicide and perfection.” Frédérique is described as a nihilist, and we confirm toward the end of the book that not all is right in her world.

Then there’s all that discipline and obedience. The narrator speaks of the pleasure of disappointment and sadness in her life, and wonders if the discipline of religious school, where she was a boarder at the tender age of eight, might have been the best years of her life. She also finds pleasure in obedience… This is a short book, so I’ll leave things at that, though I would love to tell you about the book’s very last sentence.

I probably wouldn’t recommend Sweet Days of Discipline to readers who prefer fiction with strong stories and plots, but I think those who enjoy eerie character sketches will love it. Enigmatic somehow works for me here, and Sweet Days of Discipline succeeded where Maile Chapman’s Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto (previous post) did not. Though both books concern females – not all of them stable – living and interacting in restrictive, closed places, in Parks’s translation, Jaeggy’s writing is spare, wonderfully restrained and, yes, disciplined, giving this novella a poetic beauty as it describes life’s dark corners.

And now I’m curious about Robert Walser…

Disclaimer: I have discussed literature in translation with New Directions, the publisher, but received Sweet Days of Discipline from a friend in a book trade. Thank you, Daisy, and enjoy the baking!

Up Next: Michael David Lukas’s Oracle of Stamboul.

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.