Stories to Melt Memories: Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman

Minka Pradelski’s Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman, which I read in Philip Boehm’s colorful translation from the original German (Und da kam Frau Kugelmann), tells lots of tales: the initial, framing, story concerns one Tsippy Silberberg, who comes to Tel Aviv from Germany to pick up her inheritance (a fish service, of all things), but the real story in the novel is told by one Bella Kugelman, who barges into Tsippy’s hotel room, unannounced and uninvited, to talk about her childhood in Będzin, Poland.

Tsippy’s story is, initially anyway, pretty light—even “lite,” since her obsession with frozen foods sounds rather absurd—but Mrs. Kugelman barges into Tsippy’s imagination, too, by talking on and on, first about her school days, which include crushes, skipping class, friends, neighbors, and various adventures that feel pretty universal. Tsippy’s parents, whom she calls “fearful, postwar parents,” would never let her get away with so much; she has little sense of family history other than that her father is from Katowice, near Będzin. Meanwhile, Mrs. Kugelman sometimes looks decades younger or pulls at phantom braids when she tells her stories.

Of course we—and “we” includes Tsippy—know what will happen in Poland, and Tsippy begins pushing to hear more details because she thinks Mrs. Kugelman is making her hometown sound too perfect, too idyllic. I had the same feeling and was glad that Mrs. Kugelman obliged by telling more stories, including stories of miracles, stories of who survived and how… leading to discoveries for Tsippy, who grew up in a family that appeared nearly memory-less. Though the novel feels overly schematic to me, largely because Tsippy and Mrs. Kugelman were a little too obvious as opposites or counterbalances, I still can’t help but appreciate Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman as a book about finding ways to talk about frozen memories of the everyday and the horrors, the Holocaust, that erased the everyday. Thanks to its structure and mix of characters and stories, I think Mrs. Kugelman would be particularly good for young adult readers or others who haven’t read a lot of fiction about the Holocaust.

P.S. A brief interview with Pradelski on her publisher’s Web site addresses how Mrs. Kugelman came about:

What inspired you to write your first book?

I interviewed a survivor for the Steven Spielberg Shoah Foundation. The survivor asked me not to forget his hometown in Poland: Bendzin.

Disclaimers: I received a copy of Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman from the publisher, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company. Thank you!

Up Next: Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight, which I liked very much.

Image: Old postcard of Będzin, including the synagogue, via Wikipedia, public domain. 

Making Up For Lost Time: A Month in the Country & Two Others

This has been a strange summer for reading: lots of work, lots of abandoned books, and lots of distraction from travel and big changes in the weather. To get caught up on past reading, here are quick summaries of three books I’ve read (and even finished!) over the last month or so: I enjoyed all three, albeit in very different ways, though, hmm, I can’t help but notice that all three books are first-person narratives with very strong voices.

My favorite of the bunch, by far, was J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, a lovely and lively short novel about a World War 1 veteran, Tom Birkin, who goes to Oxgodby, Yorkshire, to restore a mural in an old country church. Of course Birkin restores himself from the trauma of the war in the process but the book didn’t feel predictable at all, thanks to small twists, like a hint of madness in a lovely local lady, Birkin’s feelings about religion and faith, and an organ-shopping expedition. I particularly enjoyed some of the descriptions of Birkin’s work, like these lines I found when I opened the book at random:

It was a splendid medieval gallery—nearest me, an almost Spanish head of the stricken Christ caught amid the leaves of a gallows tree; further along, a golliwog devil thrusting his grinning head between a couple trapped in the wrong bed; finally, a plump woman holding a blue shield of lilies. It proved what every church-crawler knows—there’s always something of surpassing interest in any elderly building if you keep looking.

I’d recommend A Month in the Country to just about anyone. I’d recommend Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel, which I read in Bill Johnston’s translation from the original Polish Pod Mocnym Aniołem most to readers who enjoy Eastern European novels about drinking: Pilch’s not-so-angelic narrator, Jerzy (hmm…), tells tales of life as a rehab recidivist. He tells the tales of (and for) others on the ward, too. No novel about drinking is complete without references to Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow-Petushki, a.k.a. Moscow to the End of the Line, and Pilch fits Venya in early on, on page 11, when Jerzy mentions some teetotalling days:

“Why on earth don’t you drink?” my brothers sitting at the bar would ask, and they were angry, and the ghost of Venedikt Erofeev hovered over their heads, and their volitionless tongues spoke with his tongue, and I wrote down a few lines under his influence, and having paid homage, I released myself from his influence.

The language of Johnston’s translation, both in terms of vocabulary and cadences, is lots of fun to read; it feels like it was fun to translate, too. Finally, Ben H. Winters’s Countdown City, the second book in a planned trilogy about pre-apocalyptic America, narrated by an ex-cop living in New Hampshire, didn’t catch me as much as the first book, The Last Policeman (previous post), which won an Edgar Award earlier this year, but it still kept me turning pages, waiting for the end of the world with Hank Palace. This time around, Palace investigates the disappearance of Martha Milano’s husband: Martha babysat Palace and his sister when they were kids. Winters again looks, through the low-key and methodically responsible Palace, at questions of moral duty, wondering, among other things, who has the right to track down the missing when the end of the world is imminent. Winters includes some nice uses of a favorite word, “rummage.”

Disclaimers and Disclosures: I bought my copy of A Month in the Country; I am collaborating on a translation that will be published in a collection from New York Review Books, which published A Month in the Country. I received a copy of The Mighty Angel from publisher Open Letter Books; I always enjoy talking about translations (and not only!) with Open Letter. And I received two copies of Countdown City from Quirk Books… and gave the second copy to my local library. Thank you to all!

Up Next: Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight, which I’m loving… I have so many promising-looking new releases from publishers and used books from the library book sale that I’m not sure what will come after that…

Instructions to Self for Blogging About O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave

1. Begin by stating that Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave is a fairly conventional novel about a family.

2. Mention that the novel begins when Robert, husband of the slightly dotty Gretta and father of three adult children, leaves his London home in the morning and doesn’t return.

3. Note O’Farrell’s method for revealing characters’ secrets to the reader first, then to other characters. O’Farrell manages to make the family secret theme work better than most authors, perhaps because her characters aren’t particularly perfect or appealing people. And (of course) not everybody gets along. Be sure not to reveal their secrets to blog readers even if that makes the post bland.

4. Get over the fact that O’Farrell uses the present tense, which isn’t your favorite… it works well here, giving a feeling of immediacy, even intimacy.

5. Accept that, though there are some wonderful references to nasty aspects of a heatwave in the novel (e.g. that seeming plague of aphids) the heatwave motif will cool. Accept that, even if you are disappointed because you were hoping for a thread of heat-related strangeness. Inform everyone that the book is set during a real-life heatwave in 1976.

6. Feel the pain of Gretta and Robert’s adult children—Aoife, Monica, and Michael Francis—as they travel together with Gretta to find Robert. Find humor, though, in some of their interactions as old conflicts and affections (re)surface.

7. Forgive yourself for not understanding why the novel generally worked pretty well for you even though it was a bit slow at the beginning and didn’t feel especially unusual or outstanding. Decide that the appeal probably has to do with O’Farrell’s characterizations, which are sentimental but not goopy and present intersecting sketches of characters—people—with real problems. Remind readers that you love books about unpleasant characters who err. Appreciate that O’Farrell has a light touch with these people, making them very human but not letting them off too easy, either.

8. Thank publisher Alfred A. Knopf very much for sending a review copy! And state that the book will go on sale June 18, 2013.

9. Mention current reading of J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, another book set in England, a likely subject for a post after returning from a long week in England itself…

Levy’s Cruel Swim Home

Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, a 2012 Man Booker Prize finalist, is the sort of book I enjoy: two not-especially-happy couples on vacation/holiday in the south of France have their vacation disrupted by a not-so-happy young woman whom they find swimming, naked, in the pool. I certainly wouldn’t recommend Swimming Home to those legions of readers who seem predisposed to seek out fiction with positive, happy characters and outcomes… but I seem to have a taste for Levy’s relentless dark humor and characterizations.

The gist of Swimming Home is that the nude swimmer, Kitty Finch, a would-be poet and botanist, busts in on what’s supposed to be a holiday near Nice (hmm…) for Joe and Isabel (he’s poet and she’s a journalist who covers “countless massacres and conflicts”) and Laura and Mitchell (London-based purveyors of “primitive Persian, Turkish and Hindu weapons. And expensive African jewellery.”). Rounding out the ensemble are Nina (Joe and Isabel’s profane and menarcheal daughter), Jurgen (caretaker), Madeleine Sheridan (elderly neighbor), and Claude (nearby café guy). Other factors: depression, weaponry, family dynamics, and desire, something that seems so obvious I probably would have forgotten to mention it if I hadn’t reread Tom McCarthy’s brief introduction to the book.

Still, it’s not plot that makes Levy’s writing so appealing to me. It’s her stylistics and the diabolical things she asks her characters to say, think, and do. When I randomly opened the book just now, for example, on the left side I found Kitty, in the company of young Nina, giving Madeleine Sheridan the finger after doing a “spooky” thing that involves leaning backward and shaking her head and hair very fast. Then there’s the line “Kitty Finch was mental.” A new chapter, entitled “Medical Help from Odessa,” begins on the right side. Here’s the chapter’s first paragraph:

Madeleine Sheridan was trying to pay for a scoop of caramelised nuts she had bought from the Mexican vendor on the esplanade. The smell of burnt sugar made her greedy for the nuts that would at last, she hoped, choke her to death. Her nails were crumbling, her bones weakening, her hair thinning, her waist gone for ever. She had turned into a toad in old age and if anyone dared to kiss her she would not turn back into a princess because she had never been a princess in the first place.

Swimming Home is filled with wonderfully nightmarish scenes like these… it’s particularly fitting that its final paragraphs invoke wishes for sweet dreams.

Up Next: Maybe Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel, another darkly humorous book…

Existential Skiing in Romania: Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident

Mihail Sebastian’s 1940 novel Accidentul (The Accident), which I read in Stephen Henighan’s translation from the original Romanian, is a peculiar and often absorbing book about a chance meeting that evolves into romance and a skiing adventure. Nora, a French teacher, and Paul, an attorney, meet after Nora falls while exiting a moving tram. Time stops, symbolically, when Nora’s watch is smashed, and Nora sees herself as resembling the clock because she “heard nothing of her own being.” Her knee is just scraped but her life has shifted.

Though The Accident suffers from some serious pacing problems—I thought accounts of Paul’s previous infatuation with an artist named Ann were both too long and too, well, boringly typical without having a reason to be… though the image of Paul staring at large photos of Ann on the street are (blurb word alert!) poignant—its disparate elements manage to meld enough to form a novel that is, to borrow a phrase from M.A. Orthofer on The Complete Review, a “solid, interesting period piece.” I’m glad Canadian publisher Biblioasis brought it out in English.

One of the most interesting aspects of The Accident is Nora’s use of skiing to save Paul from himself. Paul’s “himself” is, in a way, a sort of not-Paul, since he has a suicidal bent and can be remote and self-destructively surly. Lucky for Paul, Nora’s teaching skills extend to skiing: she spontaneously proposes spending the winter holidays in the Carpathians, they buy him some skis, get on a train, and go. Skiing gives Paul new perspectives on nothingness:

“He tried to explain to [Nora] the sensation of nothingness from which he had just emerged. He felt as though he were on the outer edges of human life.”

When Nora tells Paul his speed is under control, Paul says, “Under whose control? I felt like I was in a whirlpool, a chaos. I couldn’t see anything.” On the next pages, he closes his eyes while skiing, “Only for a few second. He felt weightless, without memory, without a past…” And a few paragraphs later he calls skiing “a kind of bliss.” As someone who gave up on skiing because I never felt enough control or bliss and once saw someone taken off the mountain with fatal injuries, I thought the skiing passages made a nice metaphor for exploring risk, control, and purpose, but I’m not as optimistic as Ann that skiing is a real cure for Paul or that, “He who has been in the mountains is a free man.” David Auerbach’s piece for The Quarterly Conversation includes a nice discussion of this line; Auerbach writes that, “Paul’s guided journey through Brasov was the greatest self-actualization that Sebastian could envision, but Sebastian couldn’t believe in his own happy ending.”

Another chance occurrence in The Accident brings Paul and Ann to the mountain chalet of a young man named Gunther Grodeck. That meeting felt particularly programmed to me, though the Gothic element it brings to the book felt almost like (tragi?)comic relief among some of the rather earnest skiing scenes: Gunther lives in the chalet with a sheepdog named Faffner, a blurry portrait of his mother, and a man in a black cape whom Gunther calls Hagen for the character in The Götterdämmerung.

If I sound a little uninspired, it’s because I am: The Accident is interesting and I’m glad I read it, but it feels a little lumpy. The Accident generated a fair number of reviews when it was released in Henighan’s English translation. I’ve linked to a few below; some contain interesting background on Sebastian’s life and Romanian history.

Shenendoah

The Complete Review

The Quarterly Conversation -- this review discusses the plot problems in The Accident, noting that Sebastian lost part of his manuscript and had to rewrite it.

National Post

Words Without Borders

Up Next: I have a bit of a backlog that includes Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home and Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel.